I know I'm getting to the final stages now that the refinished seats are back in. The whole seating thing has been a worry since I started. I had planned to buy two replacement seats and fit them into the bus. The more I looked into it the harder I saw that it was going to be. Any replacement seats were going to require a fair amount of metal fabrication to make them fit.
The two main issues were that the steering wheel in these busses it quite close to the seat (made for small drivers) and the other is that the passenger's seat has to be narrow enough for the engine box to still lift up. There is a small flap next to the engine box on the passener's side which has to lift up to allow access to the radiator water reservior. If any replacement seat was too wide it would'nt allow this to happen. It would mean building the pasenger seat across the top of the engine box cover.
So, the decision was to make do with the original seats, but to have them recovered. I took them to a busniess in Moonah called Supertrim. A guy named Tony looked at them and reassured me that he had done seats from a Mazda T3500 before and he had some ideas on how to improve them.
There were two problems; the driver's seat was flat and had no shape on the part where your bum goes. The foam was flat and not very confortable. The problem with the passenger's seat was that it was very narrow on the back, had no lumbar support and the base had no shape in it.
After refinishing, not only do the seats look better, they are also much more confortable. Tony has built up the seats, improved the width of the passenger's seat, put some lumbar support in, and generally made the seats look much more alike than they did. The pics below show the story.
They've turned out OK I think, and I jagged the colour to match the other upholstery too. I had the sides and backs of the seats done in vynil to save money and to make them more hard wearing too. The frames of the seats and the brown of the cab generally looks a bit out of place now, but I can live with it.
Yesterday I spent all day on the shower. It should be finished today, so I'll see if I can post some pics of the finished job tonight.
