One of the more impactful things you can do to improve your driving experience and safety is installing some race seats. They provide proper ports/slots for a five-point harness. A seat will also help keep you and your hips planted on the seat. By Race Bucket seats, I mean added seats that add support that will keep your hips from moving from side to side. You actually sit down into the seat. Whether rock crawling or high-speed racing and everything in between, keeping your hips planted will keep you far more connected to the car. You will feel what the car is doing better and won’t be moving around, so you can control the car better literally in any scenario.
I went with some very budget-oriented seats for this project. It was a kit that came with the injection molded plastic seat, slider, and a padded vinyl cover for the seat. It will be perfect for this application.
The seat came with some sheet metal brackets; honestly, I’m not a big fan, but we will try them. I also needed to add a piece of square tubing to raise the seat.
I’m quite leery of these sheet metal brackets. We will be putting some miles down on this jeep before the sale, so we will know how well they hold up. We will carefully inspect it before the sale if repairs are necessary, they will be made at that time.
Lastly, we ran a stripping wheel over all the rust and paint to remove anything that loose. Wile stripping I did find a few very thin sheet metal spots that we may try and fill in.
We will finish prep and lay down the bed liner and install a hoop for seat belts in the next update.