Racing Seat: Initiation & templating

In the midst of the ISFC project, an interesting new project (at least to me...) came to my mind when surfing the internet for references:

Scratchbuilding a 1:6 racing seat with Logitech GT steering wheel and pedals.


The scratchbuilding project required some planning before it actually kicked off:
1, sizing - base on a Sparco, RECARO or other seat ?
2, cover materials - should it be flockings or real cloth or carpet type materials?
3, base materials - should it be styrene board, epoxy, or even by resin casting?
4, Steering wheel details - the level of details?
5, Pedals details - total scratchbuild?


Before answering these questions, some information was collected from RECARO website about their product. I chose the RECARO Profil seat as the blueprint of the build.

by scaling down the actual measurement down to one-sixth, a draft stencil was created on cardboards. By rough manipulation of the paper card boards, a rough prototype was done

Considering the later "production" stages, hoped that the seat can be produced from a single cardboard template such that by folding and heating appropriate corners, the real shape can be reproduced. Base on the 1st prototype, removing all the tapes and staples, 2nd prototype is on the paper:

The 2nd prototype is closer to the real one in terms of dimension, inclination, width and thickness. Expecting 2 more rounds before a version is ok for me.

s204: Interior (5)

The carpet prepared previously are finally stuck to the floor of interior. Honestly, the initial measurements of the carpet are pretty sloppy.

I was pleasantly suprised by the outcome. There are only a few small trims and they all can flatly laid even on the curved surfaces.

s204: Interior (4)

Planned to replace the STi bucket seats with a Sparco rally seats from an old Hasegawa rally kit. The seats came with an installation bracket. But just put them on will make the seat very low even lower than the back seats. The brackets are raised by a styrene board slightly inclined to the front so that they feel much realistic in terms of inclination, position and height.

With minor fine tuning of the angle and of the brackets, seats can be put on for testing...

Not sure if some Sparco decal can be found otherwise, just put those STi on the front. From the references, it seems all the seats in s204 are from Recaro instead of Sparco. Anyway, both seats are sporty enough in it. Wish to also put on appropriate PE seat belts, but the seats look good on 5-point instead of 3-point. Let's see.

(20/6/2009)