Individual BD-4C Seats

With the seat track supports off at the welder, I am tweaking the seats that I got for my Bede BD-4C airplane so that they fit properly. The old Piper airplane seats that I got are designed to sit on the floor. In the BD-4C, though, they are about 5 inches above the floor. As such, I need to remove about 5 inches from the seats or lose 5 inches of headroom, which the BD-4C decidedly does not have to spare. Let’s begin at the beginning, with the “treasures” that I brought home from the salvage yard.

I stripped off everything porous and you can see why airplane seats are so much lighter than car or truck seats. These are the steel frames and there isn’t any extra metal at all.

If I set these into the airplane, you can see that they are way too tall. Click on this photo and you will see that my head is way up behind the spar. I would not be able to see out the windshield at all. Worse, for this photo, I am sitting on upholstery straps right on the seat frame; there is no seat cushion at all.

Here is a close-up of the Piper seat, on the tracks, in my BD-4C airplane.

My solution is to cut as much of the legs out of these seats as possible. The back of the seat will sit on a piece of square steel tube extending straight back from the base. The front of the seat will have only enough leg remaining to keep the geometry as in the original. Here photos, part way through constructing the pieces for the left side of the first seat.

I also made a small tube to support the middle of the seat frame, running diagonally from the seat frame to the piece of flat steel. It is not in the pictures.

By the end of this evening, when the Saint Louis summer heat chased me indoors, I had all of the pieces for the left seat cut and had constructed a jig to hold things in position for welding.

I still need to do some final grinding and sanding to get everything to fit “just right.” Once that is done, I can tack weld it together. All in all, I have removed a full 5 inches of height, which is just what I needed to accomplish.