I've had a Kirkey 55 series seat, , and Crow Enterprises harness in my Monte for over a month now, and remembered I needed to post how I installed everything.

Installing the seat:
To mount the seat, I used 3/16" steel flat stock, and 2" steel square tube with .120" wall. This metal served as the mouning for the side brackets I bought with the seat. It also leveled, and raised the seat to the desired height. The two sets of three pieces of metal were tig welded together outside the car as much as possible, then welded to the car. Then the side brackets are bolted to the mounts. Each bracket has four M8 stainless steel bolts holding it to the mount, and four M8 bolts holding the seat to each side bracket. Some of the welds arent the prettiest, and welding the mounts to the car took a long time. I also still need to paint the area.











Installing the harness bar:
The harness bar was much more simple to install. The only custom work I had to do to the off the shelf harness bar was make two spacers out of steel pipe, and modify the passengers side lower seat belt bolt to fit through the support bar heim joint. The passengers seat still retains the factory belt.









Notes about the harness:
-The harness is out of pretty much any race specifications. The angle of the shoulder straps are right at 20 degrees, when they should be no greater than 10. In oreder to correct this, I will have to buy longer shoulder straps. The ones installed are Crow's standard 52", and I would need the 72" versions. I will also have to make custom harness bar supports. The shoulder straps limit the angle due to their length, but so do the support bars. To raise the main bar, I would need longer supports.
-This car with a six point harness is still my daily. I typically start the vehicle and go through the process of putting on the belt, which takes roughly one minute. As opposed to jumping in the car, starting it, and throwing on the one click, auto adjusting factory belt.
-In addition to the longer shoulder straps, I should have also gone with the pull up waist straps, instead of the traditional pull down. It would just be easier, especially if in a confined space.
-Comfort. I have two things to note here. I knew I'd be dailying this harness, so I went with the sewn in pads for the shoulder straps, and I'm glad I did. I'm a lanky guy, and thus have a very pronounced collar bone and shoulders. The shoulder staps don't dig into me, or are in any way uncomfortable. However, there is one area of discomfort. The groin. On occasion, not always, and may be caused by the positions I bolted the anti submarine belts in.
-An odd thing I noticed after driving one of my family member's vehicles is, I no longer feel safe in a factory three point belt. Whether there's any merit to that is besides the point. I dont feel safe in that style of restraint anymore.
-A positive thing about the harness I didn't expect is back pain reduction/posture correction. Because the shoulder straps hold my back against the seat, I don't have any back pain while driving, and its improved my posture.

 

The big concern with a harness like that without a HANS on a street car is frontal impacts. The stock 3pt belt / airbag works together to slowly reduce the speed of your head / upper torso to minimize damage. With a full harness properly tightened, your shoulders are held tight while your head snaps forward and can cause a lot of neck damage including paralysis.

IMO, I wouldn't have done any of this on a daily driver. It takes a lot of effort to make something safer than the thousands of engineering hours that go into a stock vehicle. You also run a big risk with insurance not covering claims if injuries are shown to be from something you modified. I get it for a toy that rarely sees the street, its certainly safer than a bike, but on a DD it's just a matter of time before you get in a wreck.


I am a bit curious about the mount though - why mount it on a flat bar? Seems like youd get a leaf spring effect on the back half since it looks to be unsupported.

 

I do plan on getting a helmet and HANS device. It might not make a difference, but I do still have the stock steering wheel and air bag.

Tbh, it was cheaper to use 36" of flat stock for the two 18" gaps between the raised portions the stock seat mounted to. As apposed to square stock, of which I used 24" to raise the seat. I also didn't consider the flat stock bending under my weight. I'm not very heavy, and the metals fairly thick. I could add a support under the middle if it ends up being necessary.

 

The hard part is using a HANS / helmet on the street if you keep using it as a daily. It's really irritating if you do a lot of driving, especially having to make a lot of stops. Had a buddy with a full cage do that years ago and got really sick of it.

Stock steering wheel / airbag wont make any difference now. Since it seems like you're concerned about weight with the Kirkey seat, I'd ditch them for weight reduction for a nice aftermarket wheel. Only way you're going to touch the airbag with that harness is if the seat mount fails in the crash in which case you've got a lot bigger problems than just hitting the wheel anyways.

I only ask because it's not a typical practice in engineering for a beam shaped like that to apply load to the middle of the flat side. Same reason house joists are stood up on the skinny side to carry load mid beam as theres far less deflection when loaded in that direction mid beam.

I don't really bring up the question in terms of comfort, but more in terms of it will throw off your calculations that you did for material selection. Depending how much flex you get at what frequency, you could end up with fatigue loads degrading the strength of the material. Calculating that by hand without FEA software would be tough. That's compounded by having a weld at the most likely failure areas contributing to complexity of how much strength you've actually got.

No doubt the metal is thick enough for standard driving loads, I'd just be worried about impact loading during an accident as those forces can get extremely high.

 

Yeah, it might get irritating eventually. But for now it's fun, and will be even more so once I get the trans swapped and turbo kit underway.

I do plan on getting a quick disconnect steering wheel setup, but I was going to wait till I got the helmet and HANS.

 

The HANS and helmet will help take the fun out of it as they're a lot more invasive. Depending on helmet style, I'd give you about a month at most on a true daily driver, lol.

Maybe it's just me though, I'm the kind of person that's pulling the helmet off as soon as I straighten out onto the return road from a run, so I couldn't deal with wearing it to the grocery store, etc. The one upside with yours is that you set your seat position to custom fit you. With me, my helmet is rubbing the ceiling over most bumps.


The other thing to keep in mind is you're going to need a thick skin. My buddy used to get all kinds of crap for having the full get-up in a street car, and he was probably a solid low 10s on the street. I'd imagine you'll get your fair share of comments from people, especially pre-turbo with a relatively stock 3800.

 

That's what lots of people say about a stripped interior, or race seat. I'll just have to see.

I don't think wearing a helmet will bother me. I'm planning on getting a forced air style helmet from RaceQuip, and tapping into the AC system for when it gets hot. I did take into consideration the added height of a helmet when mounting the seat, and not having a headliner also helps with headroom.

Yeah, I figured. But one thing is, I've gotten several positive comments about the car from the sound alone. One guy came up to the car after I started it up in the parking lot of a Walmart and said the sound reminded him of his childhood, back when cars used to have character.