Raising the seat mount.
 

Has anyone done this? Even with the seat adjusted all the way up, at 5'9" it's a bit too low for me. I can't prop my elbow on the window sill, and my eyes are so low they're nearly level with the dash. To drivers behind me, I probably look like a shrunken ninety year old, with my little bald head just barely in view through the rear window.

Anyway, I took the seat out to try to figure out a way of getting it about 2 inches higher. The only really practical way I see is to build a simple mount out of flat stock that uses the original mounting holes. Probably easy for a skilled person. Unfortunately, I'm not that skilled.

I can drill holes, and do simple bends, but I can't weld, though I might be able to bolt it together. One serious concern is that it is strong enough to be accident resistant, since the seat belt is bolted to the seat, if the seat moves in an accident the belt won't do much good.

Anyone have any ideas, suggestions, experience? Thanks.

The mount I'm thinking of making would look something like this one from Good-win for a Miata, but not so pretty:


https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rx8...b16126fddb.jpg

Hold the phone! You're 5'9" and need to raise the seat higher than its upper limit?! You must be short from the waist up, with really long legs. I'm like that at 5'7" with a 31" inseam - most guys with a 31" inseam are somewhere between 5'9" and 6'0" tall - but even I don't need to raise the seat to its maximum height to see well.

If I didn't know better I'd say either you're not 5'9" anymore or there's something wrong with your seat that's preventing it from reaching its maximum height. Is that possible?

It's been a while but I succeeded in raising the seat by about an inch and a half. Didn't make anything like the mount in the photo I posted. Instead, I simply put blocks of steel under the rear mounts, and made little steel legs for the front mounts. They go between the mounting holes in the floor, and the mounting holes on the seat brackets.

The rear mounting holes are easy, because they are drilled straight into the floor so the bolts are perfectly vertical. The fronts are canted back at about 25* from vertical, and that angle makes it tricky to get everything to line up, but careful measuring got it done.

I got the extra height I wanted, and the seat feels strong and sturdy.

I was originally going to take the mounting brackets off of the sliders, and put some steel blocks between them. That would have been a simple and direct way of doing it, but the mounts are riveted to the sliders and, not being familiar with the giant rivets they used, I was afraid of damaging the sliders when I tried to drill out the rivets. If I'd felt like I knew what I was doing and wouldn't wreck things, that would probably have been the way to go, the way I did it works, but was sort of time consuming and unnecessarily complicated.