Steering and seating covered in this post, they go hand in hand, or butt in hand. Mounting the steering column was pretty straight forward since the column drop is located by the dash mounting holes and we already had the firewall reinforcing plate in position for the brake booster, it was just a matter of cutting the holes for the shaft and the 4 bolt holes for the bottom mount, both of which were traced off the reinforcing plate. The tilt column is from a 79 Cherokee Chief  which mounts the same as a CJ column used for mock up only. It was a direct bolt in. We are still trying to locate a floor shift tilt
column. The Jeep steering wheel had a deeper offset

than the 1970 Oldsmobile wheel we are using here, not sure if we are going to use it or not. Interestingly this same wheel was used on my high school 1967 Olds Cutlass and the CJ5 I had built in the 80's. The Recaro seats are from a Chevy Lumina police car we snagged from are local u-pull for $25.00 and are alot more comfortable than the factory jeep hi-backs, plus the backs are adjustable and come with ball bearing sliders that work oh so smooth. The sliders mount right to the bottom of the seats and then a riser mount with short standoffs mount to the sliders with 3 mounting holes front and back to fine tune the tilt. We cut off the standoffs and welded

them directly to the factory Jeep scissor mounts. Here is where we played around with side to side positioning to make sure we were in perfect alignment with the steering column before final welding. A little modification will have to be made to the release handle and cross bar for the scissor function to make it fully operational and we also swapped the driver seat with the passenger seat to locate the back adjusting knob towards the center to clear the rollbar. A limiting pin will have to be installed on the sliders to reduce rearward travel for rollbar contact. These sliders have way more travel than is needed for this application. So here is Jeffrey after a weekend of grinding, fabricating and welding enjoying the fruits of his labor. This part of the build is getting exciting now. Getting closer to the final goal. Still got alot to go. He also invited his grand parents to sit a spell to get their input on the seating position. Pap commented the steering wheel was too close to his belly. Hmm must be an age thing. He suggested the telescopic column from his Cadillac. Might have to check that one out.

Ran into a problem with clearance on the lower heater case which was anticipated from looking at other builds with fiberglass bodies. Some have a double wall at the kick panel and some don't. Obvious the ones that don't have no problem. The steel body was single wall. Usually what we have seen is the inner panel cut away which is what we were going to do also, but after some brain storming we came up with a simple solution. I marked the area with a straight edge then cut it out with an oscillating multifunction power tool from Harbor Freight item number

68861 http://www.harborfreight.com/oscillating-multifunction-power-tool-68861-8493.html If you don't have one of these, get one, best $20.00 I ever spent. Then just reversed the panel giving us the needed clearance. This will just get glassed back in along with a filler piece for the bottom. This will still retain the insulting values of the double wall. A hole was then cut for the 2 pipes for the heater core. I made this hole a bit bigger for a starting point expecting to make a plate to cover the larger hole but lucked out with a pretty tight fit with only minor tweaking. The motor was then removed from the case for mock up then using a good reference point

on the stiffening plate behind the brake booster we triangulated a mounting stud location closest to the brake booster and drilled it out. A dab of black sealer was put on the ends of the other studs then carefully positioned the heater case into location using the drilled hole, pressed the case against the firewall and left sealer marks where the other stud locations are to be drilled. We could then see where the drain pipe below the motor needed to be located and drilled that out. We then drilled a 3 1/2" hole for the oversize motor, re installed the motor to verify location then cut a large enough hole to remove the motor through the firewall. This way if the motor

ever has to be replaced in the future you wont have to drain the antifreeze, remove the console and dash to get to it. I got that idea from my 95 Cherokee. We also clocked the motor that the larger flat part of the flange was towards the fender mounting area, that way the fender flange wont have to be modified. This also positions the feed terminal towards the top for easy access. The only thing that we will have to do is make a larger seal between the firewall and case around the motor