Project Pickle - How to install BMW 3-series (e36) seats in a Suzuki SJ (part 10)

I'll put it out straight away: the stock seats were never an option. Not because the stock seats in a Suzuki SJ are particularly bad or the like, but just because the ones in this specific Suzuki were disgusting. As such I started to look around what other people fitted into Suzukis and while customer bucket seats would definitely scored high in the style department, I wanted foldable seats, so the rear bench would still be (theoretically) usable. Aside from the usual Honda CRX and Suzuki Swift GTI seats, which due to popularity had become rather pricy, the only real option was to get a pair BMW 3-series (e36) seats. They are rather narrow (only 50cm at the front mounting points) and pretty low, which resulted in the seating position actually being  two or three centimeters lower than stock. On top of all that the BMW seats have height adjustment as well. With an asking price of 50 Euros for a quite well used pair of the most basic seats out of an e36 compact, it did NOT take very long to decide that these were the seats to go. So, with no further adue, please  follow me into what I can call at best an experience with a very steep learning curve. As you will be no doubt able to tell by the way the car (and the seasons) change, this took quite a while and ultimately it would be three iterations, to mount the seats in a way I found acceptable.

First attempt: Mockup and first attempt by using up some old square profile. Turns out in order for this to work properly, one should have welded in the transmission tunnel perfectly square, so there's quite a bit more room on the passenger side than on the driver side.

In order to clear the transmission tunnel, I assumed it would be best, if I simply went up a bit and so I made some approx. 30mm spacers.

While this worked, it resulted in sitting way too high up and having only very limited room between steering wheel and legs. Also in hindsight, it's quite obvious that the driver's seat wasn't in the lowest position.

Attempt number two did away with the spacers and I bought some fresh 35mm box-section with a beefy 4mm wall thickness, which was exactly twice of what the scrap bits sported. 

As the floor aside from the reinforcement ribs is "a tad" bent, it quickly turned out that a bit of a rethink was due (again) and whilst I could keep the outer sections, I had to modify the inner ones. For legal reasons, I wanted to use the mounting points of the OEM seat mounting bolts. Actually if you have a stock SJ/Samurai outside of India and think to yourself: Mine's looking substantially different in this area, you're absolutely right and yes again, I could have reverted mine to the conventional setup, but with no stock seats, why not start with a blank slate. (The obvious answer, because then I could have ignored to bowed floor pan...)

So on the transmission tunnel side, the seat would be mounted on a pair of additional tabs.

And here's the final result for the passenger side.

It sucked. Big time. If I wanted to build a BMW rocking chair inside a Suzuki, I would have perfectly succeeded. But obviously this wasn't the plan. Also it was an absolute p.i.t.a. to install and it looked so terrible that I wondered how to sneak it past the inspection guys in the garage.

As such a third and final attempt was needed. The brute-force approach was substituted with a thinner walled C-channel and the (not too dumb, if I may say so) idea that the seats should sit on a separate frame, which is then bolted to the floor pan. On top of that installation should be possible without any additional spanners, i.e. all the nuts for the seats have to be welded to the frame. 

So the basic frame idea was pretty good, but there was still some room for improvement.

Drilled holes in the top to allow easier positioning and better access to the allen head bolts, which fasten the seat base to the floor. All you had to do after that was to put the seat on top, again line up the holes and you're done.

Stealthy flat black for the win.

That's it, once you know how it's done and have the right material it's a matter of two or three hours plus the time it takes for the paint to dry and you can install BMW seats in your Suzuki. Otherwise it takes more than a month and multiple attempts.