Aluminum Bomber Seats - Sitting Nicely

I wanted a pair of aluminum bomber-style seats for my latest project and decided that I would have a go at making them myself. Most of the bomber seat magazine articles I found were on the complicated side, and involved hundreds of rivets. But reading the articles did give me some idea of how they were made and their dimensions. Each builder seemed to have his own ideas about sloping the back and making the mounting points tip. In the end, it seemed to be down to trial and error and individual taste.

I needed to have a set of very low runners and an adjustable system to tilt the seat back to get comfortable and give some support to the backs of the thighs (very important if you're driving long distances). The car I was building didn't have very much width. I found a runner system at DAX Cobras that was ideal.

I consulted Steve Jest, a good friend who works at Competition Fabrications, owned by Nick Parravani, on how to make the back all in one piece and how to form the base.

My wife, June, and I bought some large flexible card stock from an art warehouse to build a prototype seat; if we liked it we would then use these as patterns for cutting out the aluminum. We looked at a few designs and then tried to interpret them onto paper. We worked out the seat length and width based on the space we had in the car and the maximum height we had. It would be a disaster to build seats that would not fit in the car, or that you couldn't get your bottom into.

Thanks to some help from Steve Jest and the use of Nick Parravani's heavy punching and rolling gear. I now have a couple of aluminum seats that should provide miles of comfortable cruising.

I started by making a card...        read full caption I started by making a card pattern. The sides and back were one-piece and the base was shaped to fit. We taped the two side parts where it needed to fit around the base. After cutting out the sides, we made a card wedge to give it more tilt in the back, about 5 degrees. We then mounted it all on a flat piece of wood and made the front higher than the back to find out whether it was too tall or too narrow to fit the space we had available.	I then transferred the pattern...        read full caption I then transferred the pattern for the base of the seat to some MDF board to make the bucks to form the seat bottom. The buck required two pieces, one the size of the seat base and one slightly smaller. The edges of the smaller board were smoothed and chamfered with some 80-grit sandpaper. I then laid out the base pattern on the aluminum sheet and cut around the pattern leaving an extra 3/4 inch to fold over the buck. I sandwiched the aluminum between the two MDF bucks and C-clamped the two together as tight as I could (this is important so that nothing moves on the next stage). I left the front edge with no C-clamps to fold over first.	After I had knocked over the...        read full caption After I had knocked over the front edge I moved a couple of the clamps and worked my way around. I used a rubber hammer on the straight parts, so as not to mark the aluminum too much. I used a flat body-working hammer on the rounded corners. You will have to work at these corners, as the metal tends to stack up.
Once I had worked my way around...        read full caption Once I had worked my way around the aluminum and was happy with it, I released the clamps and finished off the edge with a hammer and a dolly. This dolly with a curved portion was very useful for the round corners.	Here's the basic seat bottom;...        read full caption Here's the basic seat bottom; more work with a hammer and dolly will come when bringing the two aluminum parts together.	Next I laid out the card pattern...        read full caption Next I laid out the card pattern on the aluminum sheet that Steve had roughly cut out for me. I traced around the edge and then cut it out.