Mini Hackathon

If you have ever taken one of the last carburetor Mini Cooper’s on a longer tour – you know that the standard seats aren’t comfortable. The later MPI Mini’s (MK7) – like the one I worked on earlier this year – had really nice uprated seats. But finding a good pair for a reasonable price is not easy.  A few weeks back, when I bought a used sunroof for the MGB GT, I had that chance to test the seats of an original 1994 Mini Cooper cabriolet. As it turns out those seats were Metro Turbo seats. And as the local Mini guru here in Bonn had a pair with the same color as the ones in my Mini  – I couldn’t say resist.

Fitting the seats however is not straight forward. They are a bit wider, and the base is longer. They also have much better seat rails, which somehow need to be attached. The Mini Cooper cabrio had a special frame for the Metro seats but I could not find these anywhere. So, after giving Miffi a good clean, I decided to test out how the seats would be positioned and how a frame could look like.

The goal of a hackathon is to create functioning (software or) hardware by the end of the event.  And in some way – this is what I did over the last two weekends. The front crossmember has a height of 85mm from the floor. I used a bit of wood to mock-up an additional rear crossmember of the same height. With the wooden dummy in place, I was able find the best position for the seat.

Next step was to build the whole thing properly. I got some slightly rusted 5×5 cm 2mm square steel tubing for free from a scrap bin. The upper part is 125,6cm long and I cut four 15cm long parts with a 20° angle as feet. Those were shorted to a height of 3,5cm to get the required 8,5cm total height. Two of the cut-offs are used as brackets at the end – giving the crossmember a total length of 126cm. Note that this is few millimeter less that the actual width from inner sill to sill to compensate for the rivnuts.

In the middle I had to cut an arc as the height can only be 1,5cm due to the tunnel.  After welding the parts together I gave it a good clean with a CSD on the grinder to remove the surface rust. A few holes in the back were added to use bolts with nuts as I ran out of M8 rivnuts – the last ones I had were used in the inner sills. Hardly visible if I ever want to go back to the original seats. Finally assembly was done today after the two coats of Hammerit dried.

It would be even besser if I could move the seats 3cm further in, but then there isn’t enough room for the handbrake. Might try this anyway because I need to get the seats out in a few weeks again – I think I will add heating to them🤔😉