Captain’s Chair Mod

I have spent about 9 months looking through various Delica forums and websites to find some information and guidance on how to move one of my middle-row Captain’s Chairs forward to the front passenger side location in Digby. This is a pretty popular mod for your Delica if you can have a Captain’s Chair or can buy one cheap, and I have found a good resource for this mod, (here), that show how the mod can be done with a degree of involvement and complexity.

 


Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much research you do in advance, something you didn’t expect comes along to throw you off…… When I removed the front passenger seat and lifted the carpet it became apparent pretty quickly that my simple idea of just lining up the rails and drilling some holes was not going to be as simple as I had hoped.

Firstly, the bolt holes for the rear mounting on the front passenger seat were significantly wider than either the seat holes at the front of the passenger’s seat or the width of the Captain’s Chair rails…? This didn’t seem to have been the case for the instructions I was following so I was a bit perplexed…? Next, regardless of which way round I tried to mount the rails, once I had bolted the rails into the front passenger bolt holes, none of the other mounting points on the rails came close to any of the other bolt holes..? The instructions I was following suggested cutting the rails, but even if I had done that, the rails didn't appear to fit regardless of which way round I mounted the rails….? 

Finally, I thought I could mount the rails to the front passenger seat holes and drill out some new holes and then bolt through the cabin chassis and get some nuts on them to hold the rails in place, however, and regardless of which way round I looked at mounting the rails, all the required holes were either behind the chassis rails or the fuel tank and almost impossible to access…

 

I let this information sink in for a week or so before deciding that I would look at getting an attachment bracket made that would allow me to use the existing bolt holes to mount to and also keep the full length of the rails. To do this I designed a 3mm mild steel plate that would allow me to bolt the rails of the Captain’s Chair to it, and extend for a further 24cm to line up the middle holes of the existing rail bolt locations. I made up a template to prove my dimensions were correct, and a quick SketchUp diagram that I could send out to local fabricators to work from. For $46 NZD, I had the simple bracket made up, drilled out the required holes and attached a couple of nuts, bolts and washers to use to connect them to the seat rails, and hey presto, it worked like a charm….

Everything lined up as planned and held the seat very firmly in a position allowing me to move the seat forward and backwards into the front of the Delica, and also rotate the chair reasonably easily to face the back. With a spray of black paint to seal the steel and stop any unnecessary rusting, it is now mounted in Digby, allowing me to remove all the remaining seats, (all donated to a friend of mine with his own Delica project), take out the carpet and underlay, in preparation for building out the camper in the back.