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BENCH SEAT

The bench seat that came with the truck was in bad shape but the bones of the seat were in pretty good shape. The seat mounting frame was also in good shape except for a few small rust places. The seat was from a truck and did not fit the mounts of the panel truck but that really didn't matter since I was going to convert it back into a truck. The seat springs would have been a huge job to repair so I settled on just using parts of the seat structure as req'd and fabbing a solid foam seat to mount into the stock seat frame.

I stripped the old seat down and made a template of both of their footprints. I then used angle to replicate the perimeter of the both the back and bottom. On the seat back, I welded on the lower tabs that slip into the seat frame (salvaged from the old seat) and the upper c-clip (also salvaged) that mounts it to the seat frame tube at the top. Then I fabbed a seat back out of ¾ inch plywood to mount within the framework .

I did basically the same thing on the lower seat cushion except on the lower cushion I ended up cutting out the centers and installing some elastic strapping/webbing to make it more comfortable. I then covered the two panels with foam and some cotton batting and then installed a stock seat cover.

To get the seat mounted in the truck, I bought a generic/universal seat slider and adapted it to fit the the floor mounts. I then used some 2x2 square tubing split length-wise and welded to the bottom of the seat frame to provide a mount for the frame to the universal sliders and to set the seat angle so it would be comfortable.

Once I had it all mounted and tested it out, it became quite evident that I needed to also cut out the center of the seat back like I did the bottom and put in some webbing to soften the seat back a little. I guess my lack of experience on upholstery bit me on this. So I removed the seat cover on the back and did the deed and bought a new cover to go on it. I'll just use the old cover somewhere down the road (shifter boot, etc).

Later I sent the seat frame off to get powdercoated gloss black and I sat them in the shop corner so they don't get trashed during the rest of the build.