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New Seats ***
Mazy has had her new seats for months now and it was this that I had wanted to first share when I started this thread - but a broken radiator bracket put paid to that.
There were Tombstones in Mazy when we first got her. They'd been newly upholstered and that's the kindest thing I could say about them! See this earlier thread, Reply #11:
https://www.mokeforum.com.au/index.php/topic,8064.msg94432.html#msg94432But this is the gist of it:
It became obvious soon after that fixing them up to actually resemble what they should do from the inside out, was totally out of the question...
I'd happily been using 4 'Moke Australia' seats (always intended as a temporary measure though) for the past couple of years but was bitterly disappointed when faced with not being able to restore the original seats as that had been the plan from the outset.... then.... Captain Biggles to the rescue
As luck would have it Biggles had at that stage a number of Tombstones in varying states of disrepair lying around that he offered me, and we were grateful to be able to salvage enough from them, combined with parts of the two we already had, to build two... he also said that he'd been wanting some 'choke' seats.... and, um, er, well, the swap was made! And the Rat was 'choked' in the process
The mostly rusty seat frames needed a bit of work and some reinforcing. The diaphragms we bought were also not a perfect fit, a bit wide actually, as mentioned by others elswhere on the forum recently, but with a bit of modification were fitted fine.
A combo of these plus a couple of others:
The repair begins:
And the finished product:
Now the rear seat is a real gem because as per Ainsley's seat which has been shown on the forum before, it folds up neatly behind the front seats. I liken it to 'having your cake and eating it too' - having rear seats
and having cargo space. I had long given up hope of ever finding one of these and so was totally gobsmacked when Biggles said that not only did he have one but that I could have it! Well, we made another swap with my rear 'choke' seats which Tony will make use of.
Parts of it were too rusted and pitted and needed replacing, and in the end after cutting it up to replace the various bits Tony and Alan basically re-fabricated the entire frame. After that Alan set about shaping up the seat support boards from Marine Ply:
After this it was off to the Trimmer/Upholsterer again. Very handy - he lives around the corner. Same guy who made the canopy. We're really pleased with the results:
In the end, a big thanks goes to Biggles for not only giving me the sets of seats to begin with, but for spending heaps of his valuable time on it too when he has his own mokes to work on.
Mazy