I was looking at pictures of Sparco seat brackets (that don't seem to fit for anyone) and I was thinking that it wouldn't be hard to fabricate some custom mounts that fit right. My question is would it be safe to fabricate the floor mount out of aluminum? The side mount brackets I have are aluminum so I thought why not make the floor mount aluminum too.

My simplified plan is to get two strips of aluminum, heat bend the ends to line up with the bracket holes then bolt the slider to the aluminum strips and the side mounts to the sliders.

My concerns are the streignth of the aluminum while autocrossing and should I heat bend the ends or weld a flat strip to a angled piece.

Please chime in with your 2 cents if you have any tips as I know almost nothing about what I'm doing here.

 

for our endurance cars, we choose to keep the sliders in the car because of the fact that our drivers vary in height. we've always made our own brackets/sliders and we've never really had a problem at all. as long as you use quality materials, you should be fine.

 

I know there are different grades of aluminum and I was going to check out Home Depot to see what kind of options they have, but I'm wondering what grade of aluminum should I try to get?

 

I'll post up some pictures of my non adjustable seat brackets when I finish welding them up..

 

Check this site out, when I found it my head started swimming with all the projects I could do. http://www.onlinemetals.com/

 

Thanks martini and Jimmy L. I'm feeling quite confident in building my own seat mounts right now.

 

I did this exactly... but mounted my kirkey directly to these instead of using sliders. But I used (and advise) steel(Like angle iron). Bending should work fine as long as you don't see stress in the metal. I will take some pics and post these when I get home tonight, since others have posted as well.

 

If using band steel, it is very very easy to bend using a vice and a large adjustable wrench. A ball peen hamer can be used to make tighter radiuses. As long as you take it slow and don't get it hot it will be just as strong (well, except for stress risers) as before it was bent.

Aluminum, on the other hand, will fatigue no matter what and will have to be anealed when your done.

-Dustin

 

I should edit my post. My seat brackets are adustable, just not very easily. You have to take the seat out, unbolt it, and rebolt it in the position you want. It's adjustable, just not "sliding" like OE.

 

I'm not worried about the adjustability. The setup I'm planning is to have the aluminum Sparco side mounts bolted to the Sparco slider, then the slider bolted to the custom floor mount. Bottom line is I just need to build something to bolt the sliders to.

I figured that since the side mounts were constructed out of aluminum, why can't the base be made out of aluminum? But reading the previous posts it looks like steel is the way to go.

 

Not the best looking things.. I could have painted them... But, you get the point. Heavy guage angle Iron bends well and stays strong.



You can see the full-size images here:
http://www.imagestation.com/album/?i...79&mode=invite

 

Thanks XR4racer, that's exactly what I was thinking of doing.