Buckle Up
Crashing my last build sucked. Really sucked. That chassis was my first real car build, and had a TON of time, sweat, money, and even some blood into it. There were also the sentimental feelings. Lots of good memories with that car. But I now realize that car was inadequately equipped in several areas. The main one being safety. Sure I had upgraded the seats to some Sparco Torinos, but that was about it. It was time to upgrade the seating arrangement...again!
My OEM seat was hosed. The previous owner must have gotten into a fight with a bobcat in the car.
Once the seat was pulled, free money! I think I got 72 cents, a cool pocket knife, and even a Starbucks card with $3.24 on it! Score!
The fact that I walked away from the crash is a true testament to 90s Toyota build quality. The car faired well in the crash, much better than I thought it would ricocheting off walls at 55mph. The chassis was twisted and tweaked, but the passenger area held its own. I was using the OEM seat belt, and had removed the OEM airbag.
With this build, it was time to get a little more serious. The crash was a wake up call. I sold the Sparco reclinables. They were very cozy seats, but were heavy and lacked the anti-sumbmarine holes in the bottom. I also want to move to a legit fixed back seat. It'll save some weight along with some added safety.
After spending some time perusing Craigslist, I found a score of a seat. An older Sparco Ultra, from the late 90s. It was stupid light, and a tight fit, but I think it'll work.
I also had a Sparco specific seat bracket for the SW20 chassis. Should be a 10 minute swap, right?
Wrong. The bottom mount holes on the seat didn't even come close to matching the bracket holes, much less at the distance I want to be from the pedals. (Don't want to run a slider bracket, it'll put the seat way too high)
Measure 10 times, drill once. It actually fit first try. Guess I'm getting better at "custom mods."
Easy peezy. I wanted to make sure this seat is the ticket, so I drove the car to work a few days.
Before taking the car out for commuter testing, I also wanted to get my Sparco steering wheel back in.
It's starting to show a lot of wear, but I love this wheel. The suede covered wheels are meant to only be used with gloves, bare hands tend to sweat which makes the suede all nasty. Looks like I've been getting all greasy while driving.
After using some suede cleaner and a nylon bristle brush, things look better.
Pull the airbag. Yeah, we're not trusting the 23+ year old airbag units.
Remove the wheel. Impact driver is your friend here. Don't lose your wheel alignment.
Install the hub and wheel. Pretty simple swap, takes the casual first timer an hour, takes an experienced shadetree mechanic like me about 30 minutes. This photo was before cleaning the wheel.
Back to the seat. After my work commute a few days... it just didn't fit. Even with my girlish figure, my shoulders are just too broad. With three days of normal commuting, my back was sore. Doubt I could handle track days in it, I'm getting old (get off my lawn!). I thought I could manage with a sweet deal on a lightly used seat, but it was time to treat myself to something nice.
A couple of days later, this showed up! A brand new Sparco EVO. Thanks to Rat2 Motorsports for the getting a seat so fast and at a great deal. Ian at Rat2 is a knowledgeable guy with everything MR2, and he's also on board as a "sponsor" of this car and build (if I haven't mentioned it already) and can supply pretty much any part you'd want, and will definitely get you his best pricing. To go along with the seat, I need a legit harness.
Schroth Profi III-6. 6 point, 3" shoulder belts, and 2" lap and anti-sub belts. I went with red to up the HP. Why not. Not going with a HANS system yet... it's still a street car.
Most people mount the shoulder belts with either a harness bar, or build a rollbar behind the seats. The harness bars just seem, cheap. They never look that good, and seem like they can fail in a crash, they just plain aren't needed. I will be building a rollbar eventually, but that's above my paygrade, and skill level, right now. The best solution is to just mount the shoulder belts at the desired angle (0-20 degrees per Schroth) directly to the rear firewall. To do so, the carpet needs to go, and since this is a bonafide race car(I know i just called it a street car), why not pull the rest of the carpet and save a couple more lbs?
Messy. I also removed the OEM subwoofers from behind the seats for another 5-6 pounds shaved. Little by little things add up. I would love to have a sub 2500 pound car eventually.
A paint scraper does the trick to remove all that padding.
My new EVO seat is a side mount only. This causes a problem with the OEM SW20 seat mounting situation, which uses a crossbar for the front seat mount. This wouldn't jive at all with my seat, so the decision was made, let's hack that guy out. Using a cut off wheel the sheet metal came out. I was then able to set my seat in and find the perfect driving position. Next, drill some holes in your floor. We've definitely passed the point of no return now. My holes lined up well and the seat fit.
I realized the MR2 still has quite a bit of sound deadening material on the floor. We've all heard of the dry ice trick. Or maybe you haven't, so it's using crushed dry ice to fast freeze the sound deadening so quickly that it cracks off the sheet metal floor. I always wanted to try it, so I went over to the local meat counter and picked up some dry ice. I crushed it up, and laid it out on the floor. After 10 seconds you heard it cracking. After 5 minutes I moved the ice to another section and easily scraped all the sound deadening off.
The cool thing is the dry ice is so cold it doesn't melt to water, it immediately evaporates. Theres no mess, the ice just slowly goes away. It was a pretty fun project.
I removed about 5-8 pounds of the stuff. Not bad for $10 of dry ice. I bought 5 pounds, but would recommend 10 if you try this at home. Also, wear gloves! It will burn your skin it's so cold.
After removing the deadening, all that was left is the primered sheet metal.
Not the most handsome. So I grabbed some decent black spray paint. It's just a floor, and doesn't need to be pretty.
It won't hold up that well being spray paint... but that's also the beauty of it, I can just spray paint it again every year. I'm still not totally sold on the no carpet lifestyle, so I'm keeping my carpet around in case I want to reinstall minus the padding and deadening. Like I said, I'm getting old.
Now, to install the seat and harness. The seat installs through the floor with the help of large square washers (2"x2") to help support the thin sheet metal. I also did the same with the anti-sub belt mounts. For the lap belt mounts, I used the OEM seat belt mounting points. For the shoulder belt mounts, we have to drill through the rear firewall and use the Schroth supplied plates to mount through.
Firewall side.
Engine bay side. I painted the mount plates to hide them.
Lap belt mount using the OEM mount point.
The seat and harness fully installed, along with an already dirty floor! At least it's easy to clean. This last picture was taken after a weekend away with the car. After 6 hours of driving, I was comfortable the entire trip. The 6 point is a bit of a pain if you're running errands, but that's not what the car is for.
I also removed the carpet on the passenger side and plan to use an OEM leather seat in good shape that I got from a buddy. Eventually I'll get a sportier seat for the co-driver, but not a priority right now with so much else to do.
Stay tuned for more frequent updates! My work schedule is supposed to slacken off and the car is currently on jackstands for suspension updates!