Sunday, May 17, 2009











These show the before and after stripping and priming the dash that was discussed in the previous post. Now it was time to do something about the seats. Neither seat would adjust back and forth. I used a rubber mallet to persuade the seat to move on the track and was finally successful in removing the passenger seat. It looked like someone else noticed this problem, the ends of the seat frame were beat all to hell with a steel hammer, maybe even a sledge. Upon looking closely, I noticed the track on the seat was bowed, the track on the floor also looked bowed but it was spot welded to the floor. The solution seemed to be to drill out the spot welds, remove the track, bead blast it to remove many coats of paint, including BLUE, and rust. I welded some bolts to the track to act as mounting studs. When the track was straightened, a light coat of black paint applied and bolted to the floor, I repeated the process on the other track. The seat was next. I used a die grinder to remove the mushroomed metal from the ends of the track, drilled out the pivots and straightened the track. The other side was done the same and the tracks installed with shoulder bolts and locking nuts to replace the factory riveted pivots. Oh yeah, they were also painted black. The seat was placed back in the car, the tracks lubed, fingers crossed and voila! They work, the seat moves back and forth very easily and it only took a day and a half. The drivers side was next and after nudging the seat loose with my trusty rubber mallet, I took a good look at the floor on that side. It had a large patch in the recessed area in the back seat? area, a patch under the seat and a patch under the outer seat rail. Unfortunately, the patches were made of ~1/8" steel plate which meant that the seat sat higher on the outside than the inside which, I assume added to the adjustment difficulties. Rather than go through the same process as I did on the right side I made the decision to replace the whole floor. The entire left side floor panel is available for around $125 and includes new seat rails already welded to it. I am probably also going to replace the passenger side(thereby wasting all the work on the seat rails on the floor) Oh well, that's the way it goes, I guess.

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