330GT Seat Mount Repair

When I was taking the interior out of the 330GT so I could remove the transmission, I found broken mount on the passenger seat. These mounts secure the seat tracks to the car, and have four capture nuts for each corner of the seat. These nuts tend to seize and then start to turn freely in their cages. It looks like this happened with a previous shop, and they cut the seat mount apart to release the seized nut, but did nothing to replace the capture nut. What’s worse, is they secured the seat to this half cut seat mount with a washer and a nut. With any sort of force, this seat would have come loose, so not only was this sloppy work, but dangerous and irresponsible!

There was all sorts of damage made to this area to try first stop the old capture nut from spinning, and finally to cut the assembly out, but I wanted to fix the damage, and make this seat mount safe and secure.

I bought a weld in capture nut assembly from McMaster Carr and the plan was to plug weld the cage to the bottom of the seat mount so all the upward force of the seat bolts would be on the seat rail and not just the capture nut. The welds would simply be holding the cage from spinning when unbolting the seat. I’ll use anti-seize on the bolts to stop the bolt from seizing.

I rebuilt the missing parts of the seat mount and welded the parts to the capture nut assembly on the other side as well. Once I fixed the seat mount, I made a patch to repair the cuts made to the rest of the seat mount area.

I ground down the welds and got everything to the original level of the steel so the seat tracks will slide smoothly over this mounting area. I’ll paint this area, and eventually this area will be covered with carpeting so no one will see this repair, but the owner and I will know his seats are securely fastened to his Ferrari!