Bucket Seat Tutorial

I know that this has been a topic of many discussions on these boards. A lot of us love the look of bucket seats and a console in our regular cabs. There's a lot of questions over what works with what, and how to make it happen.

I thought I'd share my journey so that it may help others.

I started with a pair of Suburban seats from a 1987-1991 and a matching console. They came with brackets that supposedly fit, but turns out they were just some junk angle iron welded to the factory ones. All information will be based off of those seats. While the way they mount is ideal for what I was trying to do, the foam is not easy to adapt the available covers to. More to follow there.



If you have the floor tabs, it's pretty easy to adapt them. I didn't, so I found some adjustable slides from Corbeau:

The Corbeau brackets fit within the footprint of the seat, so it's a good start. They don't match the factory mounting holes, though, so I used some flat stock and made adapters. They also have nuts welded to the top side for the Corbeau brackets to bolt to.


The factory seats have 6 mounting bolts, as seen in the above picture. The other four holes are where the Corbeau bracket attaches.

That got the seats mounted to the cab, but this meant my head was almost touching the headliner (I'm 6'2 for reference). So now it was time to cut down the Corbeau brackets. I was able to cut the tabs down and remove an inch from the front. I'd recommend an angle finder to keep it level side to side and maintain the front to rear pitch. Give yourself some slack as things will get tight when you add sound deadening and carpet.


A quick note here, the two holes between the seats for the console are dimples in the factory floors. This is where the front of the console mounts. You are on your own for the rear mounting points.

I now had to track down covers that would work, as I was doing a full black interior. I found these covers:

The guys were very helpful and knowledgeable and advised there covers would fit my seats (I sent them pictures). This is MOSTLY true, but it's not exact. They are a much better fit for the early Suburban seats. This is a comparison of the two:




Above is 1981-1986



These are 1987-1991.

The covers arrived and I hauled them to my local upholstery shop. In case you didn't notice before, the listings are vastly different between the two and the headrests are narrower on the later ones.

The shop quoted me $900 for the pair. I'm sure if they had to do it again, the price would be significantly more. It required much more work than they thought, but they honored the original quote.

More to follow as I've met my image limit for this post.

Heck of a first post.

Welcome from Missouri and nice fabrication work.

Part 2

The shop had to cut new slots in the foam for the correct listings, and fill the old ones. The factory lines are left to right and the required ones are front to back. They also added some additional foam to the top and sides.



The same goes for the top portion of the seat. The listing position had to be modified.


The end result is a beautiful set of seats, thanks to their patience and pride in work!



I opted to not add the armrests back, but Seatz does have an option to order them.

As you can see, this is not a quick process. There is no direct bolt in path to be had. But you can end up with a much better end product, if you've got a welder and bandsaw handy.

Here's the breakdown of cost:
Seats from FB market - $300
Seat Covers - $300
Corbeau Brackets - $280
Upholstery Fees - $900
A good 10-12 hours of my own labor.

Feel free to reach out with any questions. I appreciate all those who came before me on this forum that gave me the bits and pieces of info that got me going in the right direction.