Next project - what a headache!!!
I’m 6’5” and my knees keep hitting the wheel at 8:00 and 4:00 so I wanted to mount the seat back a couple inches.
First, upon removing the seat, I found that a prior owner/mechanic had stripped one bolt (rattling loose) and broken another, replacing it with a single sheet-metal screw. Didn’t feel very safe! I tried to remove the broken bolt with an extractor but it was so seized that it broke the welds holding the threaded section on! So now there are four sheet metal screws replacing two bolts.
Next I bought a 3/8” steel bar - partly because that is the minimum thickness of the chromed plastic spacer under the seat. By adding wood below the steel in the places where the plastic is thicker, I could replicate the plastic spacer - but at the advice of
@HB Chris I decided to make the wood thicker at the front to provide thigh support without lowering the rear. I sanded and stained the wood to match the wood trim elsewhere, and drilled a shallow hole in the end to accommodate and cover the head of the bolt going down into the slider.
The only issue with mounting the seat 2” back on the steel bar and mounting the bar to the slider is the need to accommodate the bolt head/washer from the seat bolt. I played with the left -side slider and tried bolting into the seat through both the slider and the bar. I found that the bolt head would impact the roller a tiny bit and prevent the slider from going back by a couple millimeters, but that loss is no problem if the seat is mounted 2” back. Fine. I moved to the R side and…
THE SLIDERS ARE DIFFERENT!!!
It’s nearly impossible to see from the outside, but for some reason the German engineers put the rollers in very different positions inside the L and R slider. So on the R side, the bolt head would severely impact the rearward sliding. Very frustrating. Since I had everything made already, I decided to countersink the bolt head coming out of the seat, so that it wouldn’t impinge on the roller track. I drilled a little thickness from the slider bar and more from the steel bar to accommodate the height of the bolt head and washer, but still leaving 1/4” of steel bar for strength. Even so, I needed a washer thickness at the front to space out the bar from the slider.
If I had to do this again, I would probably keep the wood spacer at the thickness of the plastic, or even less, and then use spacers between the slider and the steel bar to achieve the raised angle at the front of the seat, similar to what
@HB Chris did. It might look funny from the side but I could fabricate some sort of cover with chrome tape to hide all this engineering and there would be no need to countersink and hide the head of the bolt from the seat. However, since I had already done all the work for the wood spacer, I’m happy with this solution.
