Troopy rear seats

[troopa]

Can any1 tell me if all troopies have seat and seatbelt boltholes for rear bench seats? Or did 11 seaters (side facing rear seats) come with no provisions at all for a rear bench? Cheers.

[dogbreath_48]

My '87 3 seater doesn't appear to have any factory provisions for rear seats, be they side or forward facing. There do appear to be a few nuts welded to the underside of the floor, but no hole through to them from the top.

[holeyhardtop]

I can't say for sure about all of them, but I have done this to my troopy. It was an original 11 seater and I bought a factory rear bench seat to fit it.

The side bench seats that I have fitted have all had the holes and nuts there to bolt up from factory. You will need the lock down plates if getting side seats which can be hard to get, but the seats will work ok without them, landrover discovery's don't use them so I guess it don't matter.

For the forward facing bench seat there are welded nuts under the floor that you have to drill through the floor to locate, take it easy so you don't destroy the threads, but its pretty easy to do. I pilot drilled form underneath with a 1/8th drill, then opened it up from inside the car very carefully. (This is for the side seat mounts on the bench.)

For the rear mounts, you will see a depression in the floor pan where the mounts should go, but again their is no holes, nor is their any nuts etc underneath. To rectify this I went a bit overboard and cut out the seat crossmember from a 75 series shorty and welded it in underneath, again fairly easy as I'm no welding guru. This gives you the support for the rear seat locking mechanism to lock into. You could just plate underneath the floor and it should also be ok.

The seatbelt needs to be mounted in the pillar and their is no factory holes / nuts in the pillar to do this as the structural support was not fitted from factory. To fix this I measured the original height of factory seatbelt bolts and drilled holes through the pillar and welded a nut to some 1/4 steel plate and then fed it up behind the hole and sikaflexed it in place, a bit of overkill but strong. You have to use a bit of imagination to do the seatbelts but not too hard, I couldn't get original's so used some others form a wrecker, bit of measuring and guess work and you'll be ok.

Hope that helps

[troopa]

Sounds promising, looking at buying a 93 3 seater which has a false floor with drawers in the rear, but am hoping its not too major of a job to shorten the drawers and fit a rear bench to bung the toddler in. Its only rego'd as a 3 seater so will most probably have to look at getting it engineered.

[troopa]

HoleyHardTop did you get your troopy engineered? If so was the engineer happy with it all?

[holeyhardtop]

No engineers, I was happy with what I've done which is good enough for me as I'm quite fussy.
I registered it as a 10 seater at vicroads and they didn't question anything at the time. I have a car seat mount bracket with child restraint point fitted, that I bought for a 3 seater which bolts to the floor behind the front middle seat, allowing you to fit a child seat, but it gets a bit squishy and since fitting the rear bench I removed it as it's no longer needed.