Interior - Seats. Rebuilding

You might remember I pulled the BMW seats apart and to gain some much needed height inside the car I needed to do away with the innerspring design and use a tin bucket out of a Toyota Vitz.

The tin bucket is a rigid setup, so I called in on my friendly Upholsterer to obtain some advice on the best way we could look at upholstering the seats so that they were reasonably comfortable, but also in such a way that not too much thickness would be added to the cushion.

Grant advised that 2 inch thick dense foam was about as thin as you can go and this would compress down to somewhere near an inch. Perfect!

Grant kindly gave me an off cut so I could try it in the car.....and it worked I could still see out the windscreen.....just!

SO....on with putting the seats back together. Firstly I had my mate Bill attend to welding the tin buckets in place. They sat inside the BMW frames nicely so it was just a case of tack welding them to the frame along the front edge and creating some brackets for the unsupported sides. Again Bill welded these in place for me.

I had just intended wiping the seats down and leaving it at that. (they are quite greasy from all the lubed cables, motors and cogs and years of dust had stuck to this grease too).

Here you can see that build up of grime.

Unfortunately though the tin buckets began to rust. Its amazing how quickly they deteriorated actually. This was no good, as you can imagine, when Grant goes to upholster these seats the last thing he'd want is rust and grease and dirt getting over the new upholstery as he tries to cover them.

There was nothing for it then, but to give them a good tidy up. The grease and dirt came off okay and I touched up the rusty bits with POR15. This is a special paint that goes straight over rust, hence the name POR which is an abbreviation for Paint Over Rust.

It is wicked stuff. You put it on with a brush and it provides a nice smooth glossy coat. It is weird too cause it doesn't rely on evaporation to cure like normal paint. Instead it draws moisture to cure, so it can even dry on a wet day. When you buy this paint they warn you not to get it on your skin. This isn't because its toxic (though I imagine it is) it is because you won't get this stuff off once its dry. Meths, turps, thinners, strippers. None of them will go near it. The only way to get it off is by using a mechanical method like a grinder. Funnily enough an angle grinder to the finger tips to get surplus paint off isn't that pleasant, so you just have to wait for it to wear off over time.....about 2 weeks.

I have learnt my lesson though and always use rubber gloves when using POR15 now.

Anyway, it didn't need to be flash, the aim was just to ensure the seats were clean and well protected. Here you can see one all painted up and reassembled. Looks okay and as I say the main thing is they are totally clean now. Hard case really as I have spent about 24 hours on tidying these seats and rebuilding them and the only bits you will see after they are reupholstered is the little blue plastic covers you can see on the sides of the seat in the below picture. They will of course be painted to match the upholstery colour.

Here you can see one of the tack welds that Bill did along the front of the buckets to attach them to the frame.

And here you can see the upstands added to hold the previously unsupported sides in place. There are blobs of weld on the top too that you can see. These were actually drilled holes and weld has been put down through them and onto a metal plate underneath for added strength.

Here is a view of those metal plates from underneath. And no thats not a dribble of black paint dribbling down the support bracket, it is one of many claws on the underside of the seat. When upholstering the seats the fabric is pulled over these claws which are then folded over to hold the upholstery in place.

I'm sure you'll agree the mechanicals under the seats are looking much better now too.

Ok two seats done and ready to set aside.......whats next......

Body - Fibreglassing the Windscreen Frame

I have carried out the chopping of the roof and modifying the rake of the windscreen but I want to modify the firewall and cowl a lot more yet too. The problem is with all these cuts the body is getting quite weak, so before I cut the cowl out, I need to make that part of the car a bit more rigid.

The windscreen frame will help hold the door frames in place, but it too is weak as I dropped the windscreen down so that when the car is finished the wipers will go down below the bonnet line. To achieve that I had to narrow up the bottom of the screen so it would go down inside the pillars.

You can see here how the screen frame is down inside the door frame.

Doing this meant taking a bit out of the center of the frame at the bottom to allow it to pull in at the sides, just enough for the frame to slip down inside.

You can see in this drawing how I took a chunk out of the bottom centre of the frame to allow it to pull in.

To allow this to happen though I needed to relieve the top corners, so that when the bottom is pulled in, the relief cuts in the top corners can open up. You can see in this next drawing where I positioned these cuts and how they open up when the lower part of the screen is pulled together. I left some tabs (extra material) there so that the cuts wouldn't break right through.

So what I will do now is I will fibreglass the cuts I made in the windscreen frame as once this is back in and glassed into place it will provide a rigid structure between the the two door frames (aided by the timber braces I added earlier) that will hold everything to shape once the cowl is removed.

Anyway, here's what was involved in glassing the screen frame cuts.

Firstly I needed to lay the screen frame flat on a board so that it wouldn't be twisted out of shape. This is really important as the windscreen being 6mm thick glass won't bend so there is no way I can afford to have a screen frame that is not flat. It would not only end up with big gaps between the glass and the frame, but there is also the risk that the glass would be under tension and fracture.

Once the frame was laid on the board and I was certain it was sitting flat, the next thing I had to do was make sure when I glassed the cuts back together was to check that in addition to the screen frame sitting flat, that it was also square or in other words the frame when looked at from the front of the car would be even and not leaned over one way as that would look odd.

So what I did was add screws in each corner against the tabs I left near the cuts at the top corner of the frame. As I said before these tabs just ensured there was some strength adjacent to where I made the cuts. It turns out now they came in handy. I will call it planning but actually it was just good luck.

Then I needed to make sure I pulled the sides in evenly. I did this by letting the screen relax to its original shape and marked the line it followed on the board with some masking tape. Then I pulled the screen together at the bottom and checked how much it moved. It turned out that it pulled in about 12mm on one side and 8mm on the other, so I averaged that (10mm each side) and put another set of tapes in place to mark that. You can see both tapes below.

When I had pulled the screen by the right amount on each side, it lined up perfectly with the second tape when viewed vertically from above. In this next pic if you enlarge it (by double clicking on it), you might just be able to see a whisker of green tape right on the edge of the screen frame.

Now that it was in the right place I locked the frame in place by putting a screw against each side. The centre gap was now closed but pushed up to a peak, so I had to add another two screws to bring the frame down to form a nice curve.

Again I will call it planning....but it was just luck. The screws I used were nice and long so there was thread pressing against the fibreglass frame. This thread was handy for holding the frame down flat on the board, they acted like little adjustable teeth.

Now to fibreglass it all in place..... firstly prep some strips of fibreglass mat.....

Then mix up the resin and catalyst. I am using Polyester Resin and you mix about 3 or 4 drops of hardener/catalyst to each tablespoon of resin. That gives you a good 20 minutes or so to work with the resin before it starts to set on you. You can speed up the process by adding more catalyst, but I am no expert so the 20 minutes works good for me.

Now before getting underway, I added some gladwrap beneath the cuts so that I didn't end up gluing the frame to my board.

Then its kinda like doing paper mache. First brush on some resin.

Then place some mat.

Then soak it with more resin.

After a few layers, its just a case of letting it set.

Now I must point out here and THIS IS IMPORTANT. These are temporary patches until I have the body exactly as I want it. To do the final glassing of the cuts a bit more work is required as glassing straight over a cut like this would crack over time. I will explain the process for that in a later Blog when I start to glass up the roof chop, but for now, these temp patches will suffice.

Here is one of the top corner cuts glassed in.

And next day once the glass had hardened off I was able to unscrew the frame from the board and pop it back in between the door frames. Nice and square and fitted snuggly.