The Suzuki Swift seats that I had previously fitted in the Mini were quite wide and due to having to clear the rear storage bins, were mounted very close together.
With the new configuration of the bins (moved rearward - see https://mearcat.blogspot.com/2018/11/rear-storage-bin-modification.html), it provides more flexibility on where to where to position the seats.
After recently driving a friends' Hyundai i30, I was quite impressed with the overall comfort and support of the seats. They were certainly better than the other seats I had fitted so I went on the hunt and within a few days I had found someone wrecking a 2013 Hyundai i30. The 45,000km vehicle was written off from a frontal accident, the seats looked near new and were only AUD$200 for the pair. The i30 seat design looked very stylish with the white stitching and multiple materials/colours :
The two main changes with the mounts for these new seats was lateral position and height. I had the previous seats mounted relatively high off the floor so that the adjustable rails would sit over the cross member - in case someone short drove the car and had to adjust the seat position. I felt that the seats were too high and my head was too close to the roof with this configuration, so this time I decided to remove the adjustable rails from these i30 seat frames and put the seats in a lower, fixed position (and not care about who else would drive the car).
Before charging into the task of making the mounts from steel, I cut and fitted some simple MDF pieces for the seats to sit on. This allowed me to determine the position and height I wanted.
The seats were shuffled around a bit to get a position I was happy with - taking into account legroom to the pedals (which were fitted at the time) and lateral spacing. The height of the seats seemed to be as low as I could get without the seat rail touching the exhaust tunnel but the amount of head room was much better than the previous seats. The seat positions were then measured and noted down.
I made a quick square frame that replicated the seat frame bolt positions as this would make it easier to make the mounts.
Starting with this bare frame on the drivers side, I slowly built up each corner mount, making sure everything was level. The rear mounts bolted to the steel plates that were already welded into the floorpan. With the ~45 angle on the inner mount against the exhaust tunnel, I was concerned about the combined weight of the seat and driver pulling up on and fatiguing the floorpan, so I welded the flat bar between the corners to help distribute those forces.
For the front mounts, I had originally planned to bolt them to the side of the cross member but because the seat frames were mounted quite low (60mm off the floor), there was next to no room to get my fingers or a tool under the front part of the seat to install a bolt. I chose to insert the bolts from the underside of the floor into a captive nut on the mount. The hole in the floor was then reinforced with a piece 3mm plate steel underneath the floorpan.
To help line up the bolt hole positions when installing the seats, I utilised the rivnuts that had been installed for the previous seats. I machined down the head of some M8 bolts to make a pin and screwed them into the rivnuts. When installing the seats, the mounts would slide onto these locating pins and all the holes in the floor would then line up with the seat frame mounts. This would save me time shuffling the seats around when fitting them.
Once the mounts were finished, they were bolted to the seat and trial fitted to the car however I found that despite having the flat bar welded between the rear mounts, the weight of the seat was causing the angled mount (right side on the photo below) to move and the bolt holes in the mount were not lining up with the floor holes. To resolve this, I welded an additional thin vertical plate between the mounts.
The passengers seat was then fabricated as a mirror image of the drivers. The idea of using locating pins against the cross member worked a treat and made it very quick to line all the holes up and bolt everything in.
Once the seats were bolted in, I then had to trim away some of the plastic cover on the side of the seats to clear the cross member. This is the driver seat :
The clearance of the drivers seat with the seatbelt reel cover was approx 10mm.
With the new configuration of the bins (moved rearward - see https://mearcat.blogspot.com/2018/11/rear-storage-bin-modification.html), it provides more flexibility on where to where to position the seats.
After recently driving a friends' Hyundai i30, I was quite impressed with the overall comfort and support of the seats. They were certainly better than the other seats I had fitted so I went on the hunt and within a few days I had found someone wrecking a 2013 Hyundai i30. The 45,000km vehicle was written off from a frontal accident, the seats looked near new and were only AUD$200 for the pair. The i30 seat design looked very stylish with the white stitching and multiple materials/colours :
The two main changes with the mounts for these new seats was lateral position and height. I had the previous seats mounted relatively high off the floor so that the adjustable rails would sit over the cross member - in case someone short drove the car and had to adjust the seat position. I felt that the seats were too high and my head was too close to the roof with this configuration, so this time I decided to remove the adjustable rails from these i30 seat frames and put the seats in a lower, fixed position (and not care about who else would drive the car).
Before charging into the task of making the mounts from steel, I cut and fitted some simple MDF pieces for the seats to sit on. This allowed me to determine the position and height I wanted.
The seats were shuffled around a bit to get a position I was happy with - taking into account legroom to the pedals (which were fitted at the time) and lateral spacing. The height of the seats seemed to be as low as I could get without the seat rail touching the exhaust tunnel but the amount of head room was much better than the previous seats. The seat positions were then measured and noted down.
I made a quick square frame that replicated the seat frame bolt positions as this would make it easier to make the mounts.
Starting with this bare frame on the drivers side, I slowly built up each corner mount, making sure everything was level. The rear mounts bolted to the steel plates that were already welded into the floorpan. With the ~45 angle on the inner mount against the exhaust tunnel, I was concerned about the combined weight of the seat and driver pulling up on and fatiguing the floorpan, so I welded the flat bar between the corners to help distribute those forces.
For the front mounts, I had originally planned to bolt them to the side of the cross member but because the seat frames were mounted quite low (60mm off the floor), there was next to no room to get my fingers or a tool under the front part of the seat to install a bolt. I chose to insert the bolts from the underside of the floor into a captive nut on the mount. The hole in the floor was then reinforced with a piece 3mm plate steel underneath the floorpan.
To help line up the bolt hole positions when installing the seats, I utilised the rivnuts that had been installed for the previous seats. I machined down the head of some M8 bolts to make a pin and screwed them into the rivnuts. When installing the seats, the mounts would slide onto these locating pins and all the holes in the floor would then line up with the seat frame mounts. This would save me time shuffling the seats around when fitting them.
Once the mounts were finished, they were bolted to the seat and trial fitted to the car however I found that despite having the flat bar welded between the rear mounts, the weight of the seat was causing the angled mount (right side on the photo below) to move and the bolt holes in the mount were not lining up with the floor holes. To resolve this, I welded an additional thin vertical plate between the mounts.
The passengers seat was then fabricated as a mirror image of the drivers. The idea of using locating pins against the cross member worked a treat and made it very quick to line all the holes up and bolt everything in.
Once the seats were bolted in, I then had to trim away some of the plastic cover on the side of the seats to clear the cross member. This is the driver seat :
The clearance of the drivers seat with the seatbelt reel cover was approx 10mm.
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