Thanks for the comments, I hope not too many are offended by sliding seats in a Lambda. However my feeling is that the original car had at least two seperate backrests, which made me think about fitting two separate seats.
I did a bit of work on the car today, fitting the lower backrest plates to the frames by welding the pivot points into the frames. Then I could not resist to try and bend some 10mm tubing into the shape I wanted for the backrests. I want the top of those to follow the curve of the body, and discovered making one side was easy, but then bending the other side to mirror the first one is quite a challenge!
I started out using my example ardea seatframe as a template, but off course soon had to divert, since one side needed to be lower and the opposite one higher.
Although some fine tuning has to be done, the general shape is now more or less what I had in mind. I only used some vise grips and a very rudementary tool for bending concrete iron, and my bare hands and knees.
On the tooling: I'll have to admit that appart from collecting/restoring Lancia's my second hobby has become to collect tooling for that. Now this has been caused mainly by driving Beta coupés for many years, and I always used to say: if you buy a Beta, welding equipment will follow soon....
With no money to spend to have jobs done on the car, and having learned a lot from my father (although he was a volkswagen beetle/bus man), I always did the work myself. Liking things to be done proper, the tools came more or lessby itself through the years. The past ten years I'm working as an independant, which has some advantages in this field I must admit...
Tooling used to make the seat frames are a sheet metal shear, I used a manual brake to bend over the edge at the top, and then used an hydraulic brake to completely flatten the bend (making a flattened U) The metal used is 1.5mm thick. Then the manual brake was used again to bend them into an L-profile
I then used the eckold machine to shrink the inner part of the L to make the nice curves in the frame. I needed five in total to make two exacly the same, mainly due to mismeasurements on my own account....
The little lower sides of the backrests I were laser cut (not by me
) after I copied the exact shape of the ardea frames. To make the relief in these frames I used the pullmax. This is a hughe machine originally mainly used for cutting metal into eg circles or other shapes, but due to it's reciprocating action, can also be used to make swages etc in metal. Pictures hopefully explain!
The eckold is in fact an electrically driven shrinker-stretcher machine, and is the mother of all the small (and some of the really good) hand or foot operated hobby machines. Only the eckold does is much quicker! This is not always an advantage, it is also much quicker in completely destroying your workpiece!
My particular eckold is one only found in Holland, and is called a 'Fokker' Eckold. I was told the 'Fokker' airplane manufacturing company operated fourhundred (!!!) of these machines. The machine is dated approx 1960....
These machines are very wanted as they have a pedal which when operated immediately stop the operation, and this has proven very handy on more then one occasion.
Voila! Hopefully these ramblings were not too boring!
last picture is of the home made tooling to make the reliëf in the 2mm plates. The pullmax machine can handle sheet metal up to 4mm!
