Thought I would add my latest update to the thread. When I was originally planning out this restoration job I always had the intention to fit a very nice set of seats I had in storage that came from a 1996 Subaru Legacy GTB that I used to own. In my opinion they were incredibly comfortable, looked good and held you nicely in place when driving hard. When it came time to fit seats to the car I opted initially to fit the original Saab seats back in to the car. They were perfectly good seats, were heated and quite comfortable BUT they had next to no side bolsters and didn’t support you very well when pushing it round corners. So, recently I decided to have a go at getting the Subaru seats ready to fit in the car. The work would firstly be to measure everything up so see if they would physically fit in the car, then measure the rails and mounting points to see if they would give the same fore and aft positions as the Saab seats, and check if they would be higher up, lower down etc. After a fair bit of measuring up and comparing with another set of old cloth Saab seats I had I decided that they would fit almost perfectly, BUT a lot of fabrication would be required to make rails that would work. The simplest option was to dismantle the rails from the Saab seats, cut and modify the rails on the Subaru seats to accommodate the Saab rails, and finally weld them together. To be fair, it was not too difficult, but the complete dismantling of all of the rails on both sets of seats was interesting, also with the drivers Subaru seat being completely electric added a few more challenges, but in the end I got the brackets completed, painted up and fitted on the seats. I did a test fit and they were perfect, almost exactly the same position as the Saab seats and giving an equal range of fore and aft positioning. So, next step, clean the seats up and paint them to match the rear seats! This is where things cocked up a bit!!! I bought a leather refurbishment kit from eBay for a very reasonable £30 after sending a sample of the original colour to the supplier. I got the paint a few days later and went about painting the seats exactly as they described. Initially I thoroughly cleaned the seats, then used their solvent based cleaner to remove and remaining polishes / waxes from the leather, then applied the first coat of paint by cloth, working it in to all of the crevices / stitches etc. The next 2 coats I sprayed on with my smallest spray gun, and after everything was completely dry I applied 2 coats of the supplied satin clear coat again with the spray gun. I was delighted with the finish and colour and in the spray booth the colour looked fairly similar to the seats in the car, BUT when I moved the seats out of the booth in to daylight it was blindingly apparent that the paint supplier had sent the wrong colour, a considerably lighter shade of grey….. So, I got in touch with them. They were very helpful and after seeing my pictures took full responsibility for the . up. I explained that I really didn’t want to re-colour the front seats again and I would rather paint the rear seats and armrest in the same shade as I actually preferred it to the darker grey, so they agreed to get me some more paint sent out using the remains of the original paint as a sample to match to. So, that is where I stand. Front seats fitted and I’m now waiting for the new paint kit to come so I can do the rears. I will put some pics up when I get the rears done. I’m quite excited about the lighter grey colour to be honest, even the front seats brighten up the otherwise very dark interior so even though it was not what planned I think it turned out to be a stroke of luck really.
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The only thing I am going to change (or modify) is the JT 3" exhaust, it's simply too loud and droney at 2000rpm which is typically the most consistent cruising rpm of the vehicle. I'm going to start by fitting a 'DB Killer' baffle shoved up the tailpipe and bolted in place in the hope it kills the drone, otherwise I'm going to think about making my own exhaust system up.
