For this week’s ‘Sim Work Night’ it was time to give the Arrow a little love. She has been sitting in the corner not doing very much for a while with a non-working pilot seat stopping anyone from going for a fly.
So with power tools at the ready I embarked on a quick and dirty mod to the seat base to get her flyable again.
The base I used was from one of the seats rescued from the original 767 home cockpit at work. It was built from MDF, and had re-purposed car seat rails mounted to the bottom of the structure. I simply modified the fixing points of the old base to match the mounting points on my new ex-737 passenger seat frame, then fabricated a pair of aluminium brackets to secure the two parts together.
Since the base uses car seat rails, they are not designed to attach to a flat floor I then made spacers and special over-sized washers to allow the rails to be secured to the floor of the sim. During the modification process I found that the years, and use that the base has had have not been kind, so I had to add screws and glue to strengthen the structure.
![](http://ta4ksim.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/IMG_8754-scaled-e1583279279312-794x1024.jpg)
Securing the seat to the floor turned out to be a much tougher job than I had expected, with the spacing and alignment of the rails being super-critical to how the seat moves.
After much sweat, possibly some bad language and much much more time than it should have taken, the seat is finally in place.
![](http://ta4ksim.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/IMG_8755-1024x768.jpg)
With everything in place I fired up the sim for the first time in ages and went for a quick test flight around Tauranga, where I’d obviously left it last time… The good news is that the seat height is about right, the bad news is that I am now back to the drawing board on the seat base. The rails are not working effectively, and the structure is still a bit wobbly, despite my strengthening efforts… So the next night I spent sketching up ideas for a much more solid base/rail assembly which will hopefully make for a far better seat setup!
![](http://ta4ksim.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/img_4336-768x1024.jpg)