Take a seat…

Matt gets comfortable with his Austin Seven body build

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. One of the most important factors to consider when building a ‘special’, or indeed restoring any classic, is driver comfort – or in my case, driver fitting in the damned thing. An Austin Seven isn’t the largest of vehicles and I’m not the smallest of chaps, but I’ve got the opportunity at this stage to make the driving experience as comfortable as possible, within reason.

As I alluded to last month, I’ve opted to fit a set of off-the-shelf vintage-style round back bucket seats from Bad Boy Classics, as advertised in this very magazine. I’d tried these for size in the past and found them to be comfortable and supportive yet narrow – and the excellent working drawing on the BB Classics website confirmed that they would be just narrow enough to fit the Seven.

Once ordered, they arrived in double quick time and soon I was trying them for size. Although they fitted on the floorplan, the frontmost corner of the seats rested hard against the transmission tunnel to the point where the outer profile of the body would have needed to be an inch wider than the original drawing at its widest point to clear the outside corner of the seat. The problem area of the transmission tunnel sits just forward of the frontmost mount of the axle’s torque tube where the Hardy Spicer propshaft joint mounts, which made it possible to reduce its width sufficiently to allow the seat to be moved across that vital inch. Careful marking, having made myself comfortable in the seat with my knees under the steering wheel (tight) and feet on the pedals (somewhat awkward), was followed by even more careful cutting before the tunnel was clamped solidly onto the bed of my sheet metal folder and an infill piece TIG welded in.

Once the tunnel was re-positioned over the propshaft and attached back to the floor sides with Cleco fasteners, the seat could be trial fitted once again. With the front corner positioned in the cut-out, the seat sat straighter and meant the angle of attack on the pedals was far more comfortable. Now all I had to do was mount the seat in position.

The BB Classics seats were supplied with runners to allow for adjustment fore and aft, however there simply isn’t the height in the Seven to use these. Instead, I inserted four pieces of M8 thread stock with points ground onto their ends into the holes in the seat base. I tweaked the seat position until I was happy, then pressed the seat down hard. This allowed the pointed ends of the studs to mark the soft aluminium and provide a guide for where the mounting holes needed drilling.

Critical fasteners

A simple mounting solution would be to use M8 setscrews from the underside of the car to fix the seat in position, but in engineering terms this isn’t ideal. Should the bolts rattle loose, they