Bringing up the rear... Part 1

With a general direction for the interior established, I wanted to do something a bit special to the rear seat to make them unique as well. Looking at the original rear seat, I noticed that the center panel between the outboard rear seating inserts had a rectangular design that was also mimicked on the rear seat cushion. My first thought was to just eliminate the design and have a smooth panel between the outer seating areas similar to the sport interior.












Then one afternoon while replacing the high mounted rear stop light bulbs in a friends Crown Vic I stumbled on the solution to making my rear seats different... a fold down rear arm rest! The CV had a black interior and with the rest up and from a distance, you really didn't notice it. The wheels began to turn!

The following weekend I paid a visit to my local salvage yard and told them I was looking for a rear seat back with the arm rest. They said to go have a look around and see if I could find something that would do the trick, so off I went. After searching for about an hour, I found what I was looking for. A couple quick measurement revealed it was very close in size to what I would need for the Torino, so I went back in and made the deal.

When I got back to the dealership and put the seat in place, I couldn't believe my eyes... the seat back fit almost perfectly! I threw the matching seat bottom in but it wasn't thick enough to fill the area between the back and the floor, so out it came and for the heck of it I put the Torino seat bottom in place and... tada!! It worked!! As you can see in the attached pics, the new seat back had built in head rests. I toyed with the idea of incorporating them as well but I didn't want to deviate too far from the original design, so I set about determining how to fit the arm rest assembly into the Torino seat backs.













































After stripping the upholstery off the new seat back I proceeded to tear away the seat foam to reveal the framework. Once I got down to the shell and could see how the arm rest mechanism tied into the back framework, I pulled out the ole angle head die grinder with a 3" cutoff wheel and went to town.

In Part 2, I'll show you the arm rest installed in the original Torino seat back as well as pics of the seat as received back from the upholsterer. Until next time....

ZEBRA 3 OUT