Making a seat

Chassis Setup, Tires & Handling Forum
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Just throwing this out there. Who has tried to make a seat? Pro & Cons?

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I am sure a tech official somewhere might take issue with it eventually. Otherwise, why not?

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I have made a few custom fit seats. A few on laydowns karts and now some for superkarts. A custom fit seat is maybe the best thing you can do to improve your driving because being held in comfortably helps you focus on driving inside of sore ribs. I have made the seats two ways, one making a mold so you could make multiple seats or another that just makes one off seats. Making a one off is pretty easy and seems to work well because you usually don’t need to make more than one seat.

Here is a step by step process on how we have made the recent one off seats.

  1. Step one - Get an old oversized seat or you could use wood to make void area to to fill with expanding foam. We covered ours with blue painters tape so that we could use the same old seat to make multiple custom seats. But you could just go straight into seat if you are going to junk old seat.

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  1. Step two - Put plastic double layered in seat so that two part expanding foam can go between layers. We get the foam from fiberglast.com.

https://www.fibreglast.com/product/2_Lb_Polyurethane_Mix_and_Pour_Foam_24_25/Foam

You use equal parts of the foam and found that a solo cup of each was good amount for our setup. Mix foam and than pour foam between the plastic and than sit in seat for around 15 mins while foam expands around you and than hardens.

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  1. Step three - Pull plastic out and than cut extra foam off and start to shape the seat how you want it. We use hacksaw blade and long razor blades to cut shape. You can also sand it down with aggressive grit paper. We had to tape some of the edges where the foam blended to old seat to hold things in place.

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  1. Step four - Once shape is good cover the seat mold in blue painters tape. Make sure you lay it as smooth as you can and use the good vinyl style tape.

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  1. Step five - Cut 2 layers of 7oz cloth fiber glass to rough shape and than glass the seat.

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  1. Step six - Pull out 2 layer seat and cut to shape using dremel or some sort of cutoff wheel. Than we layered 3 more layers on the back side of seat. We did this because if you did all 5 layers inside you build up thickness and it might get to tight. By doing 2 layers first and than everything else on backside you will still fit tight in seat.

  2. Step 7 - We than put some foam ribs down back and edges of seat. This will help build up a nice edge and lots of rigidity.

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  1. Step 8 - We than used matte fiber glass to cover the foam and build up a nice strong edge. We still need to sand and paint but here is what a close to final super comfy custom seat looks like.

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@JeremyBaldi That is pretty much I was thinking. Only thing I might do different after step 4 is take a negative of the impression. That way I can fill and sand smooth the small winkles that the tape would make. Nice write up by the way. :+1:

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That is what we did for one of the earlier seats. It did allow to smooth it out much better made a nicer looking seat. So it defiantly is another great method. It was a bit more work and we never used the mold again. We found once in the seat you didn’t really notice any bumps with the suit wrinkling underneath you so just went with this quicker method this time. I do plan to use lightweight bondo to smooth these seats out to look a bit nicer though. Good luck in what ever you do. You will not regret having a custom fit seat. It is the best.