Anyone here have aftermarket seats?

[ghunt81]

My driver's seat is rough (not surprisingly since the car turns 20 this year), I already replaced the lower seat cover because the original one split in the middle, and now the upper has a hole in the left side lumbar support. I got the lower seat cover cheap because it had white paint or something on it, but gennie leather uppers are way expensive (like $120 just for one) and the only other option is vinyl.

So I started looking at OEM seats, can't find anything locally and stuff on ebay is too expensive with shipping, and then I looked at some aftermarket seats.

Sparco makes some really nice sport seats (R100) that recline and are around $300 each, so I'm thinking about ordering one to replace just the driver's side for now.

My question is, can these be adapted to factory rails? I would assume with a little fab, it wouldn't be that difficult- Sparco wants you buy the mount, and the slider, and hardware all in addition to the seat and those alone cost more than the seat does. I just bought a manual driver's side seat track and the bolt pattern isn't too far off what I found for the Sparco seats, so I would think I could just make an adapter plate out of some steel strip. I'm no stranger to fab work so this seems very doable to me.

Anyone here done this?

 

[rocknrod]

I dont see why not. Here is a pic of the seat bracket (where someone was installing aluminum blocks for height) to give you an idea.

 

[Macman45]

It’s not that hard to recover the upper with OEM used seat material from a donor seat. I bought a seat that had a bent frame from a crash and stripped off the leather and installed on my seat for about $60.

 

[Macman45]

I have better pics of the process but this is it. After an hour in the sun any wrinkles disappeared

 

[ghunt81]

I know it's not hard, as I said I already re-covered the bottom. But the cheapest (and only) genuine leather cover I have been able to find was, as I said, $120 on ebay. There aren't any "pick a parts" or anything in my area. I can only find vinyl covers otherwise.

At any rate I had a few people tell me that most of these racing seats don't fit bigger people very well (I'm 6'4" and 290 lbs) and the R100 isn't very comfortable, and the ones I could use are $450 each and up. Not sure if I want to spend that much on a car I don't track or anything.

I'm actually now considering throwing some WRX seats in the car, found a guy selling the buckets from an '04/05 WRX on marketplace for $200 but he's 3.5 hours from me so it would be an entire day to get them and come back...I don't really know what I'm going to do yet.

I considered newer Mustang seats but all the ones I find are way expensive and/or have blown airbags.

 

[Macman45]

$120 doesn’t sound bad at all but to all their own

 

[86GT351]

Probably be a little more, but have you considered an upholstery shop?

 

[ghunt81]

Well I ended up finding a good deal on some WRX seats, gonna figure out how to swap those onto my original tracks. I've always thought these seats didn't give you much support for a sports car and these have much better bolstering on the seat back and bottom.

 

[Forty61]

Well I ended up finding a good deal on some WRX seats, gonna figure out how to swap those onto my original tracks. I've always thought these seats didn't give you much support for a sports car and these have much better bolstering on the seat back and bottom.

Pictures would be neat, the seats in my new WRX are really comfy and feel infinitely more supportive than the ones in the Mustang.

 

[ghunt81]

Having them shipped so I haven't gotten them yet. I'll post them up when I do.