1959 Sprint gets new (old) seats

When I bought the 1959 Giulietta Sprint a few years back the PO had installed Duetto round tail Spider seats in it.  I never really learned to like them so when a pair of unknown Italian, probably Alfa Romeo or Fiat seats in good shape for $300 came up for sale on Craigslist I decided to go for it and bought them. 

There were no seat tracks included and one seat had a rusted bolt broken off in the base but other than that they were in original and very nice condition.  I pulled the Duetto seats out and sold them to a friend which turned out to be a mistake because it didn’t occur to me that the track widths of the seats could be different than the car.  Last weekend, a year after removing the Spider seats, I finally got both seats neatly and permanently mounted. 

“Fabricato Dalla Suardi Francesco & Figlio, VIA BINDA N 20, TEL. 470-412, MILANO.”  Anyone know anything about these people?

The mounting ended up being pretty complicated so I don’t feel so bad for how long it took to get it done.  The main problem was, the track spacing on the floor was 1 inch wider than the track spacing on the seats.  I reused the aluminum channel supports the PO used for the Spider seats but I lost one of the seat tracks in the move to my shop, so I switched to using the original Sprint seat tracks that thankfully the PO decided to hang on to.

  Sizing up the Sprint seat tracks.  Note the distance between the mounting holes in the track is about half an inch longer than the holes in the seat bottom.

Using the aluminum cross pieces created the second problem, the spring bases of the seats hung down an inch lower than the track mounting faces.  The seat tracks made up for most of the distance.  Another problem that was discovered is that the fore to aft spacing of the mounting holes on the seat bottoms was less than those on the tracks.  To cure both problems at once, I fashioned 1/8″ x 5/8″ x 14″ rail spacers that aslo acted as adapters between the tracks and seat.  Once I had all 4 seat tracks mounted to the seats and began trying to mount the seats I noticed the final problem.  The floor section that the captive nuts the tracks mount to stuck out too far for me to just drill through the aluminum cross pieces and bolt the seat tracks through them.

I made four 3 inch long adapters from leftover stock that the rail spacers were made from.  The adapters had a tapped M6 hole to secure the seat tracks to, a countersunk hole to screw through that used the captive nuts in the floor and a hole to bolt the adapter to the aluminum cross pieces to firmly hold everything together.  All in all it took me about 7 hours from start to finish. 

The finished assembly:  Aluminum cross piece and adapter bolted into the floors captive nuts with the seat track bolted to a threaded hole in the adapter.  Good thing there is a drill press in the shop.

A picture of the finished product.  The Sprint interior looks pretty good.  The door panels are coming apart a little so that is probably the next job I’ll tackle on this car in the years to come…

I spent a lot of time looking through books and at different Italian cars online and before giving up on figuring out what these seats are from.  As I was writing this blog entry I remembered a  Sprint project from one of my Market entries that had similar seats.  That picture is below.  Amazingly enough the seats are late 101 1300/1600 Sprint seats.  Happy Birthday to me! 

Here are the same seats in the project Sprint that was the subject of Market 11.