Update by Tim Suddard to the
Sunbeam Tiger project car
May 23, 2011
We drilled a simple piece of angle iron to help make our seat sturdier.
With another layer of steel in place, our seat stays put even when we're driving "enthusiastically."
Here's the new rail addition in place.
We also made a new upper trunk floor that can accept a full-sized spare tire and some extra tools. The restored original piece is in the attic for safekeeping.
We quickly carried out a (hopefully) final round of sorting to prepare our mighty Tiger for the New England 1000 Rally, scheduled for the last week of May 2011. Along with installing a larger rearview mirror and fixing a few minor issues, we also tackled a couple of larger tasks.
By design, the stock Tiger seats have a tendency to lift when the car is cornering sharply. We needed to design a way to keep the seat held down in the rear; however, it still needed to be able to freely slide back and forth for adjustment purposes and lift up for when we cleaned the car’s floors. After some thought and a look at a Triumph GT6 seat we had up in the attic, we decided to use the latch that holds the GT6 seat to the floor.
Unfortunately, the Triumph seat base was of a totally different design; some fabrication would be needed. We took a piece of scrap angle iron from an old bed frame, then milled a groove in it that would allow the GT6 latch to slide back and forth. We bolted this piece of angle iron under the seat track, aligned it with the latch, and then bolted the latch on the back of the Tiger seat. Voila, seat lifting problem solved!
We also had to figure out how to make a larger spare tire fit in the trunk. We love our 15x6-inch and 15x7-inch wheels and tires, but much to our chagrin, we realized that the trunk floor was only designed to accommodate a narrow 4.5-to-5-inch wheel. Rather than destroy the trunk floor we had already built, we put it in the attic with all of our other original parts from the car.
We then set about building a new floor. We measured and cut a piece of plywood, then covered it in carpet. While the new floor lost us a couple of inches of trunk space, we now have much more room under the floor for tools and spares. We even got the car cover we carry with us to fit under the floor. It had been taking up much of our trunk space, so we’re very happy with this modification.
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