OEM seat and hardware weighed in at 58.5 lbs.

Recaro hardware was 10 lbs and seat was 16 lbs (26 lbs total).

So that's 31.5 lbs of weight loss per seat. Quite a bit shy of the overly-hopeful 40 lbs I was aiming at, but that was arbitrarily ambitious and the seat is actually more comfortable than I expected.

Now to sort out the hardware....

 

Pictures? Pictures.

The OEM seat is on sliders. The Profi isn't, which makes it lower to the ground. The Profi will be at the same height as the OEM seat once installed, if not the same height.

 

I'm having my fabricator make a custom seat base. Using heavy-duty steel for safety reasons, so I'm expecting it to weigh about 5-7 lbs. So the final tally for weight loss should be around 25 lbs per seat. The seat base will raise the seat by an inch, so I should be able to maintain my current seating position, which would be ideal.

I can shave ~2 lbs off by swapping out the steel side mounts for aluminum.

Eliminating the sliders would drop another 5 lbs per seat but I don't want to put a fixed seat in this car. I did that in my STi because it was a four-door car, and I could get behind the seats using the rear doors. Not so much in a tight coupe like the V8V, so the sliders need to stay. Plus it's fun for other people to be able to try my car out to see just how different it is from a standard V8V, and fixing the seat in place would make that a lot more difficult.

 

Looks like I'll be doing a lot of fabrication to make this perfect. Adds some extra work and a time delay, but it suits my borderline OCD tendencies! It'll be a truly bolt-in affair once I'm done

Here are some crappy cell phone test-fit pics (it fits really, really well!)

 

Will you be using the factory seat belt or going with a harness? I will be interested to see that fitment.

Great project!

 

Yes me too ;-)

 

Using the factory seat belt at first, but hopefully the idea I have will eventually allow the use of both.

 

Awesome. Keen to find out how you're going to tackle the SRS and seatbelt tensioner warnings... (resistors I assume?)

 

Yep, already have the resistors. Going to put them into connectors to make them a finished "module" that plugs right in

 

I'd keep the OEM seat belts and buckle, then just add the harness and keep it there for track days. This way your passenger can still wear the factory seat belt and avoid a court case if *knock on wood* an accident happens...K.I.S.S

You're keeping the weight sensors right?

 

That's the plan

Since the seat belts attach to the seat hardware (and not to the car itself), the Recaro hardware doesn't allow their use. So the fabrication I'm having done to cover that will be side mounts with mounting points for the factory seat belts.

The weight sensors I'm still trying to figure out. I don't want to disassemble the original seats to transplant those into the new ones, so I'm still mulling over a few ideas on how to deal with them.

 

Headers installation is underway! Doing a bunch of documentation so it'll take me all weekend, but I've just weighed the OEM vs high-flow cats. The original numbers I posted for these showed a 6.5 lb weight savings. Actual weight savings is exactly 8 lbs So there's an extra pound and a half savings I didn't know I had. Water break, work continues...

 

Have you thought of converting to hood and trunk pins like on the GT4. There should be a few pounds saved removing the factory latch assemblies

 

Hood pins are mostly done for safety on race cars. Installing them on a road car would require irreversible modifications to the hood and trunk, which is something I want to avoid (unless it's an easy to replace/inexpensive part). Great idea, though

 

3.5 lb weight loss from the left-hand side (12 lbs 15 oz vs 9 lbs 7 oz). Right side should be slightly more since I'm deleting the EGR, and the pipe I'm removing for that weighs 1 lb.