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I decided that I'd like to try some seats that were a bit
better at holding me in place. The cloth seats that I got
with the car were great, pretty comfortable and had proved
to be very hard wearing. Their only drawback was that due
to my slight build, I still tended to rattle around in the
7 and would have to brace my leg against the tunnel on bends
to stop myself moving sideways.
I did some surfing around and decided that I couldn't really
justify the cost of a pair of Tillets, nice as they are.
I found a guy called Mark on the Locost
Builders who went under the name of Triton. I did some
more searching and found he made several different types
of seat, wide, low cut, full height sides, etc. I contacted
him and placed an order for 2 off of the narrow (in order
to fit a Caterham) low sided (so without side slots for
harnesses, they come over the top) and paid a couple of
extra pounds for 6th point harness cutouts to be added.
I also decided that I would try having them painted to match
my car, Titanium silver. With this in mind I thought it
would be a good idea to avoid the normal black finish and
went for white instead, so it would be easier to cover and
hopefully chips won't stand out as much. The total cost
was less than a single Tillet seat!
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Back
Of Seats
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Trail
Spacers Fitted
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The seats are made to order so took a couple of weeks
to arrive. Once they did I set about making them fit in
the car and tailored the angle to my taste. I used some
spacers I had laying around to begin with to get the right
height (as shown above) and then once I was happy I substituted
these for some 40mm diameter Ali tube under the front mounting
points to tilt the seat back to get the angle of my legs
how I liked it. The base of the seats are fitted with captive
M8 threaded inserts, so fitting to these is quite easy,
I just fitted the slides and then made a new hole to suit
the spacing of the seat fixings. The hardest part is trying
to gain access to the fixings from the underside of the
car. I was used to be able to remove the base of the seat
- now I can't and you need arms like a Gibbon to reach anything.
Once I was happy with the seat fitting I removed them, marked
which one was which and then arranged to have them painted
by a friendly company I know through work. They turned them
around in a couple of weeks, fitting them in when their
paint shop was empty, and then returned them to me. They
were very shiny!
The final step was to refit them in the car and try them
out. In the meantime I had bought some padded base pads
from a company called JK
Composites in red, trying to match the car again. These
are fitted simply using double sided tape and then placing
them carefully as you won't get a second chance! By now
the weather was better so I went for a test drive. My hips
fit them very well and I wasn't thrown around in the car
at all. The only problem I had was that the back of the
seat was too shiny and my shoulders and upper back was sliding
around on the glossy finish. To solve this I got a couple
more padded sections from JK Composites for my shoulders
and back and stuck these in place. This was much better,
I stayed put during the corners!
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