Part 13

Racing Seat and Harness Installation In 90 (or so) Easy Steps -by resident seat and harness expert, Van

I will explain in an easy to follow, step-by-step manner how you too can install a racing seat and six point racing harness. Please allow 3 months for completion.

Warning!!

Installing a racing seat requires the use of dangerous power tools in conjunction with alcohol consumption.  Always use appropriate eye and hearing protection (unless you can’t remember where your goggles are, or you can see them, but they are clear on the other side of the garage and going and getting them is really a hassle), and always use good judgment (for instance, always decide against building a race car).

1)       Spend months agonizing over which seat to buy.  Keep in mind the following criteria:

a.       Drivers come in all shapes and sizes & they all need to fit in the seat,

b.       The seat needs to meet LeMons rules,

c.        You want to be able to install a slider so that the seat is adjustable,

d.       You will need to be able to install a seat back brace. 

Things to worry about later:

e.       The seat needs to fit in the car,

f.         Rule changes may make your purchase obsolete.

When deciding which seat to buy, price is going to be an issue.  It’s tempting to go the less expensive route, but remember, this thing is going to protect your life in the event of an accident.  On the other hand, money you save on a seat purchase can be used to buy beer.

2)       Wait practically forever for the seat to arrive.

3)       Open the big box that the seat has been shipped in.  Bask in its shiny glory.  Enjoy how wonderful the seat looks now because once the installation begins, the polished aluminum glow will fade and you will learn to hate the filthy thing with all your heart.

4)       Go to the hardware store and purchase all the fasteners you will need (nuts, bolts, washers, fender washers, lock washers, locking nuts, & jam nuts).

5)       Test fit the seat in the race car.  Take special note that the door won’t close because the seat is too wide. Also note that it seems to sit pretty high in the car.  Probably too high for the driver’s helmeted heads to be within the roll cage.

6)       Remove seat from car.

7)       Cut section out of transmission tunnel and cut rear factory seat mounting bracket out of driver’s floor.

8)       Carefully measure opening in transmission tunnel and fabricate cardboard template to cover hole.

9)       Duplicate cardboard template by painstakingly cutting & trimming a piece of aluminum.

10)   Using a heavy brass hammer and block off wood, pound aluminum into approximate shape to fill hole.

11)   Fasten new transmission tunnel into place using rivets, nuts, bolts, and RTV.

12)   Drink a beer and tell yourself that it’s actually a good thing that your handiwork looks like crap.

13)   Carefully study instructions that came with seat slider assembly.  Marvel at how money and trees have been saved by printing the installation instructions on a 3 inch by 4 inch piece of paper that contains absolutely no useful information (in four languages!).

14)   Spend a couple of hours installing seat sliders to bottom of seat via trial and error.

15)   Install seat mounts to bottom of sliders.

16)   Put seat in car and decide, “Well, that’s never going to work!”

17)   Remove seat from car.

18)   Trim seat mounts to fit better.

19)   Put seat in car.

20)   Remove seat from car and trim more.

21)   Repeat steps 19 & 20 until seat fits (about 200 times).

22)   Put seat back in car and screw around trying to get the thing to line up.

23)   Decide that the fasteners you bought don’t include everything you needed to finish this today and 5 hours of this bullshit is enough for one day.

24)   Drink a beer.

25)   Stop at hardware store to buy more fasteners.

26)   Put seat in car and mark holes for drilling through floor boards.

27)   Remove seat from car and drill holes in floor boards.

28)   Put seat in car and find that the holes don’t line up.  Scratch head and wonder how the hell that could have happened.

29)   Mark additional spots for drilling, remove seat from car, open a beer.

30)   Put seat in car and bolt in.  Discover that the slider allows for almost an entire inch of forward and backward movement!!

Seat test fitment

31)   Take car to roll cage builders.

32)   Figure out team name.

33)   Design team T-shirts.

34)   Wonder if you are ever going to see the car again.

35)   Drink beer.

36)   Today’s the day! Pick up the car from the roll cage builders.

37)   Find out that the seat fit is even tighter than you thought.  Race seat will need to “toe out” at the front in order for driver to clear roll cage.  Cage builder has done you a huge favor though and welded bolts into the factory seat brace so that you don’t need to go through the floor (thanks Doug!)

38)   Take car home and test fit seat.  Discover that new holes will need to be drilled in the floor pan.

39)   Drill holes and wonder at which point the bottom of the car goes from being “a piece of steel with holes drilled in it” to “a big hole with some steel still in the way”.

40)   Mount seat in car.

41)   Have tallest driver get in car and discover that the top of his helmet might be too high.

42)   Email LeMons technical guru for roll cage clearance clarification.

43)   Drink beer.

44)   Check email and find out that seat will definitely need to be lowered.

45)   Remove seat from car.

46)   Remove Slider from seat (that thing was a POS any.  Glad to see it go.).

47)   Attach seat mounts directly to seat and put back in car.  Discover that with the seat sliders gone, you are going to need to drill holes in the seat itself to mount the front of the thing.

48)   Remove seat from car and carefully measure locations for new holes.

49)   Drill new holes and tell yourself that without side windows, a few holes in the bottom of the car will be handy for allowing rain to drain out.

50)   Mount seat in car.

Making the seat fit with the roll cage installed

51)   Rear mounts are too high, remove seat from car.

52)   Take a drink of beer.

53)   Try to get some warmth and feeling into your fingers and wonder where you put your gloves.

54)   Trim mounts and put seat in car.

55)   Repeat steps 51 through 54 until seat fits.    Frozen steel and aluminum will suck the heat right out of your hands.

56)   Have tallest driver get in seat with helmet on and find that clearance is more than adequate.

57)   Success!! Enjoy a beer!!

58)   Find out from further reading of the rules that the seat is now too LOW because shoulder harnesses are coming through the seatback at a down angle.

59)   Give thanks that you still have one seat mount that has not felt the spinning, grinding edge of a cutting disk yet.

60)   Drill more holes, cut more aluminum, and finally wrestle the seat into a position that works inside the car.

Installing seat back brace

61)   Discover that rather than 8 months until the next LeMons race, you actually have 4 months.

62)   Order racing harness (thankfully you actually researched this before hand and have a pretty good idea of what you need.

63)   Receive racing harness and mounting hardware (ordered separately).

64)   Remove seat.

65)   Follow instructions explicitly for mounting of anti-submarine belts.  Hey, that was easy!

66)   Mount seat.

67)   Agonize over locations for lap belts.

68)   Screw that, install the shoulder belts.  Another success.

69)   Decide on lap belt location and remove seat.

70)   Drill your holes.

71)   Attach one lap belt.  So far, so good.

72)   Mount other lap belt…. WTF?  This one is different from the other 5?!  Looks like mounting the final belt will have to wait.

Oddball lap belt connector.

73)   Drink a beer.

74)   Luckily, CR is there and works with guys that fabricate stuff from steel all day long.  Even more luckily, CR brought over a couple of growlers of micro-brew.

75)   Attach lap top belt with zip ties and try harness.

76)   Drink some micro-brew.   That’s the stuff!

77)   Anti-submarine belts don’t reach and mounts will need to be moved forward.

78)   Remove seat and relocate anti-submarine mounts.

Anti-submarine belt installation, take 2.  Actually took 3 tries as the 3” inch harness clips needed to be replaced with 2” harness clips.  How many holes can you count?

79)   Drink some micro-brew.

80)   Install seat and check anti-submarine belt length.  That’s close.

81)   Send CR a drawing of what you need fabricated.

82)   Get bracket from CR.  Thanks CR!!

83)   Install new bracket.  Works perfect!

84)   Install se… WTF?  New bracket is interfering with the right rear seat mount.

85)   Remove seat and trim seat mount.

86)   Test fit seat.

87)   Repeat 85 & 86 until seat fits.

88)   Install seat for the last time (Ha!).  Job complete!!

89)   Find the gloves that you were missing in step 53.

Success!

Bask in the glory.  Sure, the seat no longer has that “brand new” look that it had when you bought because you drilled a bunch of holes in it, and you don’t have any use at all for that fancy Italian slider, and the aluminum mounting brackets have been cut more times than -----------------, but the job is done.  And done well!  Well enough, anyway.

That’s the abridged version.  In actuality, the seat was removed and installed in the car absolutely no less than 100 times.