I'm reusing my MX5 seats, to make them fit I'm removing the reclining mechanism and replacing them with flat steel plates. But I don't want it to look too 'industrial', so I'd prefer to keep the size down. Is there any way of working out how thick steel or how big the bracket needs to be?

Even a less than scientific guess would be good, or perhaps some advice on the best way to do it?

Working out the strength of the bracket is normally the easy bit, the trick is knowing how much load in needs to take... (ie the min strength it needs to be)

Assuming that its a fairly simple steel bracket and you'll make it from some half decent quality steel then you could try something like this - put a known load on the old bracket (like a big weight or something similar) and try to measure how much it bends, then put the same load on your new one and as long as it bends the same amount or less it should be strong enough


If you really want to do some calculations the this site is full of useful stuff: www.roymechx.co.uk



[Edited on 2/3/2016 by mcerd1]

If you dont own an engineers gut feeling replicate a factory bracket or copy a somebody elses mod.