I got some camera lens cleaning stuff, so the pictures should be better!

In order to see how well the seats fit, I put the nearside harness in and gave it a try.

Isn't too bad - except the handbrake is very limiting.

As you can see, there's lots of room to the driver. I decided that it needed moving forwards and towards the driver.

The first thing that needed to be changed was the rear mounting point. It had been cut and welded at an angle to fit the existing location.

After welding it straight (I would imagine that it was originally straight anyway), I welded a bolt to the top of the chassis tail and a plate to the side of the fuel tank shell.

This is a much better position for it.

However, with the handbrake in the new position, it's no longer possible to use the adjusters to get the cable to reach the end. As a result, I needed to make an extender.

My first idea was to copy the same basic shape of the existing bracket, and put a hole in it.

That was taken while it was cooling down, and half finished. While it was cooling, I fitted the starter motor cable. Although it's only one end of one wire, at least I've made a start on the wiring!

I had a bit of a worry that I'd broken the starter when I undid the retaining screw, but after a quick test out of the engine, it seemed fine.

That gave plenty of time for the piece to cool, so I was able to finish it off.

The only problem was that the handbrake cable was interfering with the harness now. In order to prevent this, I made a guide tube that the cable fits through to stop it from touching the harness (I thought that the SVA and MOT people would not look kindly on something that could seriously damage the harness).

With that in place, the hand brake could not be done up properly because the looped section of the steel wire was hitting the guide tube - which could not be cut down. Which meant plan B.

Plan B was to make a shorter extension, but have the wire loop unlooped, which meant that it could be adjusted from both ends (during my experiments, I found the handbrake side adjuster).

This is much better than before - but did take a long time to get right (there was a lot of thinking time involved).

On every production car I've driven (except for my old VW Beetle), the handbrake has a warning light - the same one that tells you if the brake fluid is low. It took a while to find whether I needed this in the SVA manual - there has to be a way to test the brake fluid bulb is working, and the handbrake is a convenient way to do this.

I'd already anticipated this, and had bought a microswitch with a long arm already - so I made a bracket for it.

And this was welded to the chassis. There's a convenient point for the switch, which I assume was the same for the car the handbrake came out of.

I then got the half-covered gearstick section, bolted it in place, and then trial-fitted the seat.

This seat will still have to be slightly moved over a bit.

It was now time to drill the holes. In order to fit these seats, you need to pull the bottom padding off them, and drill through it, and the floor.

I labelled the seat (since they'll all be hand-drilled), and then drilled four 5mm holes as guides.

And then 10mm for the back bolts, and 12mm for the front bolts. I did all 3 seats - and numbered each of the bolts.

The reason for this isn't apparent, but since my arms don't reach around the car, I needed my neighbour's help to do them up. Numbering them meant I could tell him which one to hold the wrench on.

And that was it - three seats fitted.

This was by far the longest day I've had working on the car, but I really wanted to get all three seats fitted by the end of the day.

Tomorrow actually marks a bit of a special day - 1 week until the SVA. I still don't have all the parts, and I've got a feeling that this will mean I'll end up missing the SVA. If I know I'll be missing it, I'll have a day off - I've been working pretty solidly the past two months, and I could really do with one!