[Purcell69]

The past few days have been incredibly hot and humid at our place with the heat index pushing 108*. Normally this doesn't bother me much after all the years I lived in AZ, but the humidity and no breeze has made for an ugly combination of conditions. It also seems that every afternoon as I head out to tinker with the seats after work, thunder storms start to blossom up around us. I welcome the rains here in August, i really do, and the storms put out a nice cool breeze as they pass by, but it is a little unsettling working under the trees with all that lightning nearby.

In spite of all this, I did manage to make two seat base mounting templates to mark my hole locations and orientation. I say two because after making the template for the driver's side, I placed it up to the bottom of the passenger side seat base and found the mounting hole locations are different from side to side, not a mirror image of the driver's side, like I was hoping for. In all, it just took a few extra minutes to make the second template, and I had the materials on hand to do it.

The white foam-filled poster board is easy stuff to work with and is rigid enough to make good templates. It is also cheap enough that if you make a mistake bad enough to have to start over from scratch, it isn't a huge expense. I started with one full board clamped to the bottom of the driver's seat base and used a Sharpie marker to mark the locations of the four foot pads for the seat base. Once they were marked, I cut the board down to size and began to make more accurate markings on the poster board for the mounting hole locations.

Three of the four mounting points for the seat tracks are wells for the hardware, under the tracks. As a result, If you are going to use studs to mount the seats, rather than bolts, you need to be sure the length of the protruding stud isn't so long that it will interfere with the seat tracks. The nice thing about the wells is GM has small holes in the sides of the wells that correspond with the center of the mounting holes in the bottom of the wells. This makes it easier to locate your centers when you transfer them to your floors or templates. This is only viewed from the side axis, but looking down the tracks you can eyeball the center of the front/rear axis.

When it came time to make the holes in the templates, I cheated and used a Dremel tool to grind through the poster board that was clamped to the bottom of the seat base. This gave me the hole locations and orientation, then I used the poster board to mark the cab floor for the new holes. The marking that I made previously, on the poster board, helped to ensure the punch was centered when I marked the spots to be drilled.

Once the holes were drilled, the seats were set in place. Everything fits as it should and now all I need to do is make my anchor plates with studs to mount the seats. Since these are power bases, I have been using a 12v battery charger to move the seat tracks back and forth for access to the wells for the mounting hardware.

Since I still have the fuse panel and wiring from the Ron Francis wire harness kit I bought years ago, I will mount it as a sub-panel for my electric accessories rather than try to tap in to the Dodge wire harness. I had already planned on mounting this panel in the right rear corner of the cab, so I will not need to run wires across the front of the cab floor to the seats.

-Joe