It’s a big, order old van and it needs new seats. Or at least new upholstery.
Spent a good hour calling around to junk yards yesterday, including TruckWrecking.com and had no luck digging up a set of seats for a 1985 Ford Club Wagon XLT. The seats any Ford van built in the surrounding 10 years would probably do it, but no one seemed of a mind to help. I have a couple more numbers to call in the morning.
In case you’re still looking for seats…
I’ve spent many days in junkyards and on the phone to them.
On one of my vehicles, when I could not find the exact seat I wanted, I just drilled new holes through the floor of the vehicle and used beefy washers and tar to make sure the new hole was strong and waterproof.
Thanks for the note, Ken. Yeah, I’ll be digging around for these for a little while. Not sure I want to get into remanufacturing the vehicle – there’s so much other work to be done. This weekend’s task: Valve cover gaskets.
Uh, that is, I used a seat that wasn’t an exact match, but worked just fine except for where the holes lined up. ALSO: be sure to use high-strength bolts and nuts if you go this route, not the generic Home Depot ones. Ask your hardware store about that to get the higher strength steel, it only costs a couple bucks more. The tar also helps keep the nut from loosening.
Cool that you’re doing this. I hope to build a mutant vehicle someday, like in a few years when the kids take less maintenance.