Improving the Berlina again (pt. 1)

[Scott Fisher <sfisher71@domain.elided>]

Saturday afternoon, Joe Cantrell arrived at my house
thinking he was going to help me install a speedo
cable in my Spider and instead wound up in a three-way
wrestling match with the floors of my Berlina.

I was most of the way done with removing the driver's
seat from my Berlina when Joe arrived with his
daughter (who has become quite popular with my
daughters; Kim took all the girls out shopping for the
afternoon to celebrate my younger girl's birthday). 
By the time we got around to attempting to reinstall
the driver's seat, it became apparent that there had
been some major bodging in the past.  Our challenge:
could we outbodge the previous workmanship?

Not without help.  We screwed in the inboard
(un-bodged) bolts on the driver's seat, and then Joe
and I (accompanied by my son Charlie) headed over to
Jeff's shop, where he has basically enough gear to do
a home version of the show "Junkyard Wars."  The
problem was that both outboard seat mounting brackets
had been buggered by, um, "inexpert" attempts at rust
repair in the past.

How inexpert?  The forward bracket has been brazed
into place -- at least the yellowish metal that
vaporized on contact with the wire-feed welder LOOKED
like brazing rod.  For that added special touch, the
Artful Bodger had apparently brazed directly over the
asphalt-based soundproofing.  

The rear mounting was the real trouble spot, though. 
How Alfa designed this to work: there's a squared-off
"top hat" with an oversize hole in it, and a floating
nut designed to live inside the "hat."  The brim of
the hat is welded to the floor of the car, and the
screws go through the seat rails and down into the
floating nut, which tightens up against the crown of
the hat and holds the seat in place.

Well, at some point in the past 29 years, the hat had
come loose and Signor Bodger had flattened two sides
of the box, drilled a hole through the floor, and
bolted completely through the floor to hold down the
seat rails, using the flattened top-hat section as a
spacer.  Not something I wanted to trust to braking
stresses at PIR.

Jeff found some suitable armor plating -- 1/8" steel
plate, to be precise -- and given that we were working
against a couple of deadlines, we improvised something
that I think is pretty solid.  Jeff welded the plate
to the floor, did a modestly passable job of not
simply burning up the thin floor sheet-metal when
trying to repair the cracks that had probably formed
when the hat broke away in the first place, and then
built a spacer to keep the seat level.  

The final glitch in Saturday's work arrived after we
drilled the hole; Jeff had to get ready for dinner
with guests, leaving Joe and I with the realization
that the welding (or the beating with suitable
hammers) must have caused panels to shrink or move
around -- the hole didn't line up with the rear hole
in the seat channel.  So we did up the three bolts
that WOULD work and drove, cautiously, back to my
house.

Stage 2 happened the following morning...

--Scott Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon
.
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