Fitting "tillets"

[James.Burton]

I'm fitting some bucket seats, and can't for the life of me get all 4 passenger bolts to fit.
I'm believing that it's the seatbelts that hold the passenger in place. The seat bolts could surely pull through the aluminium floor easily enough in a crash.
In the standard cloth / leather seats, the bottom seat squab isn't fixed in place at all.
Hence I'm thinking as long as I have the front two in place to stop the seat tipping, all is good.

Does my thinking make sense, or am I being a complete idiot?

 

[Midas]

The standard seats are fitted to runners, but in basic terms they are simply bolted directly to/through the floor and then are held in place by the penny washers and nyloc nuts that bolt it to the floor. The important bolts are the seatbelt bolts which in my car affix to threaded inserts on the chassis.

[DirtBuddha]

Are you using runners with your Tillets, or the aluminium box section channels, or just bolting the seats directly to the floor?

 

I have tried many different approaches and found the runners to be the worst, becoming very hard to move once bolted down and getting jammed up with grit over time rendering them unusable. I binned them, they're junk.

The aluminium channels were better and I have no problem using them.

However, the best solution I found was exhaust bobbins screwed directly into the Tillett base with a large penny washer and nylock at the underside of the floor. Exhaust bobbins are cheap and plentiful on eBay and come in a wide variety of heights. I experimented with different heights front/rear to get the exact height and amount of tilt I wanted (which for me was 35mm from / 15mm rear bobbins).

One tip is to use a hole step drill/cutter to enlarge the holes in the floor a bit... or more likely just redrill them where you want.

I don't care that the seat isn't adjustable fore/aft, no-one else drives my Caterham and the adjustable runners are unusable junk that don't work anyway as previously stated.      

 

 

 

Edited March 24 by DirtBuddha
updated

[paul richards]

Standard floors have reinforcement in the form of channels underneath where seats are mounted. Lowered floors are thicker gauge. In any event repair washers should also be used. 4 holes are used to secure seats. All should be used but may need a little fettling sometimes. 

[Golf Juliet Tango]

Quote

exhaust bobbins screwed directly into the Tillett base with a large penny washer and nylock at the underside of the floor

Exhaust bobbins. Clever. 👍

[bluenose]

I don’t like the steel runners either and got some aluminium tiltable runners fabricated that make fitting the seat very easy.