As my vacation comes to a close I made a little more progress on the inside welding over the last two days. The first area I completed was the seat brackets for the buckets. The floorpan comes setup for a bench seat so there are 2 brackets you have to position and weld into place in order to mount the buckets. The one issue I ran into as that there appears to be conflicting ways to put the seats in the car. I found several pictures (most) where the lever to move the seat is on the inside (near the driveshaft tunnel) and then there were a few with it on the outside. The good thing is that the seats will mount on either side, I actually tried both ways and the inside lever mounting was the way that it was when I purchased the car.
In the pictures below you can see the seats positioned in the car and they line up quite nice. Although after some test fitting I did notice that the drivers seat leaned to the rear a bit more (about 1/4") than the passenger. There are some steel "L" shaped braces that stop the seat when you put it back so I'll have to adjust/bend them to make the seats align correctly.
Here's the drivers side seat brackets with the seat removed.
And the passenger side, The brackets are a bit hard to see in the picture but there is a small piece to the front and outside corner with a bolt and then the large plate with two bolts towards the driveshaft tunnel.
Here's a picture of the cross-braces nearly 100% completely welded. When I bought the floor pan they didn't have a 1-piece floor with the braces welded in place so you had to buy separate parts. They now have the 1-piece floor, and my advice is to get it! It'll save more than a day's work.
This shot shows all 3 braces .... a spot-weld every 3/4" to 1" which is more than required I'm sure but it shouldn't go any where.
The next project was to repair the x-brace in the rear seat that was torched out when they added the large wheels to the car several years ago. I looked at a lot of pictures .... the one below giving me the best idea of how it looked from the factory.
This is the design that I went with that is slightly modified from the original but given the difficult bends simplified the approach. I started by taking some flat 18 gauge steel and forming it to closely align with the x-brace pattern. Then added a piece of flat steel to fill in from above the inner wheel well to the bottom of the x-brace. On the bottom I added another piece of steel that tied everything together and to the floorpan.
Here you can see the difference with what I started with and the final design. On the left everything that is red is from the original and will need to be filled in with the same pattern as the drivers side.
The picture below was taken from the trunk and from the distance closely resembles the factory look. With a little more welding and grinding then some paint it should look nearly factory from the inside of the trunk and obviously with the seat in place it'll work just fine. The best part is that this has added a lot of strength and tied the sides of the car together which is what was intended by the factory.
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