civicx3
Drop a gear & disappear!
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2009
- Messages
- 1,813
Just looking to get some opinions on my seat rails after a old woman caused me to have a head on crash at about 40mph and if you think the seat rail brackets are a bad design and potentially unsafe?
The cars damage was front crash bar, slam panel and chassis legs but everything else was fine, the doors still closed, the floorpan was fine and luckily the engine is ok and is already in another car along with all the other parts that survived!
Now onto the seat rails
The driver side brackets completely bent and twisted and the rail fell over because they're not joined together so me and the seat ended up facing towards the right and pushed into the drivers side door
The passenger side brackets bent and twisted and again pushed the seat over to the right and there was no one sitting in the passenger seat! This happened with just the weight of the bucket seat which are lightweight Sparco Grids weighing around 6kg each
My argument is this would never of happened with standard seats or Recaro rails. These seat rail brackets are made from 3mm steel which are full of holes for the mounting points and because they're 4 separate brackets and not a single piece per side they can easily twist out of shape. If you were strong enough you could probably grab the seat and twist it and bend the brackets but if it was a single bracket per side like every other bucket seat bracket ive ever seen then they wouldnt be able to twist and would be much stronger and would not of bent like this
So with that in mind i tried finding some stronger brackets to fit these rails but no one makes brackets for these rails and even the universal brackets didnt fit because the holes wouldnt line up with the studs on the rails. So i had no choice but to make my own from a pair of universal seat rail brackets....
If i was being fussy i would of liked them to be made from 4mm steel but i can already tell that my home made brackets are much stronger than the standard brackets that are being sold with these seat rails
So what do other people think? Are these a bad design or is this acceptable considering the crash?
The cars damage was front crash bar, slam panel and chassis legs but everything else was fine, the doors still closed, the floorpan was fine and luckily the engine is ok and is already in another car along with all the other parts that survived!
Now onto the seat rails
The driver side brackets completely bent and twisted and the rail fell over because they're not joined together so me and the seat ended up facing towards the right and pushed into the drivers side door
The passenger side brackets bent and twisted and again pushed the seat over to the right and there was no one sitting in the passenger seat! This happened with just the weight of the bucket seat which are lightweight Sparco Grids weighing around 6kg each
My argument is this would never of happened with standard seats or Recaro rails. These seat rail brackets are made from 3mm steel which are full of holes for the mounting points and because they're 4 separate brackets and not a single piece per side they can easily twist out of shape. If you were strong enough you could probably grab the seat and twist it and bend the brackets but if it was a single bracket per side like every other bucket seat bracket ive ever seen then they wouldnt be able to twist and would be much stronger and would not of bent like this
So with that in mind i tried finding some stronger brackets to fit these rails but no one makes brackets for these rails and even the universal brackets didnt fit because the holes wouldnt line up with the studs on the rails. So i had no choice but to make my own from a pair of universal seat rail brackets....
If i was being fussy i would of liked them to be made from 4mm steel but i can already tell that my home made brackets are much stronger than the standard brackets that are being sold with these seat rails
So what do other people think? Are these a bad design or is this acceptable considering the crash?
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