Chopping up the seats - 64 Toyota stout Build

In Australia, us car builders have to comply with strict rules and guidelines to be able to legally register a custom car. These seats are an example of that. It’s not impossible to engineer a completely custom seat but the testing involved can get very expensive according to my engineer. The next best thing is to use factory seats as out of something else and make them look fancy. These buckets started life as the rear bench seat from a 2008 Nissan Navara. I like the idea that they can fold up against the rear wall which is critical to access the fuse box lids beneath the floor. I ended up using the internal skeleton and hinge mech of the factory seat and added covers. The engineer was ok with me chopping the bench into buckets and making a few adjustments as long as the majority of the seat structure remained original. Sheetmetal bomber styled seats are not allowed so the complete face of the seat will be padded and upholstered. Backing plates are required behind all seat mounting surfaces. I’ve taken the seat to the stage where I can make and secure those plates before the cab gets welded together. Next job is to mount the seatbelts which may use the same backing plate as the seat mounts. The priority is to get every component inside the cab mounted before the cab is finally welded together as it is easier to access internal structures and remove panels for adjustment as shown in this video. Recently I’ve been lucky to add a Machinery house power hammer to the fleet of tools, it arrived at beginning of planning these seats. Most of the work you see isn’t visible when the car is trimmed which made it the perfect thing to practice on. I experimented with making dies to form specific shapes, sandwich panels to hammer form the 1.6mm mild steel seat brackets . The shrinking dies took a bit to get used to but they have opened up so many possibilities and improved the speed in which I can shape metal. I still have a lot to learn on the hammer but like anything, practice is key. Thankyou for following along :)