This page will cover modifications and restoration work not covered in other pages.
It took me a good nights sleep to think out a solution to the problems. Both my part cars had power bench seats, so I figured I could take the underside of these seats, cut out the sections where they attach to the power seat tracks and then fit those parts to the bucket seats.
This will not be easy, but I am not into this hobby to make life easy, that's for sure.
Here are the remains of the bench seat bolted to the power seat track. The next now will be to cut the bucket seat apart to have it fitted to this. Anyway, before I do thatI had the seat installed in the car with original tracks in the far back position and meassured up carefully where it was positioned originally. Doing so will help me get the modified seats as close to the original position as possible.
As mentioned, the Lincoln seat track attaching bolt pattern did not fit the holes in the Mercury floor. I did not want to mess up my floor making a lot of new holes so i decided to make some modiications to the seat tracks.
I welded on some small brackets, drilled holes that worked for the Mercury floot and welded on the nuts for the attaching bolts. Now it fits perfect.
Here is the finsihed seat bottom with the seat back hooked on just to check out if everything came out right. To the right I have one modified and one original seat. The modifications are pretty obvious. Now I have to do the other one and then they are ready for cleaning and new paint.
Pictured above is the bottom of the bucket seat cut out and I am testing how it fits onto the bench seat parts. To my surprise this worked out even better than I hoped for, and only minor adjustments had to be done prior to welding the seat together.
My car did not come with the factory optional power seats. Anyway, I really wanted 6 way power seats in my car. To find a set originally made for a low production car as the 67 S-55 is impossible so I bought a set of power seat tracks from a 69 Lincoln Mark3. According to my parts manual these are almost the same as those used for the 67 S-55 bucket seats. The floor bolt pattern would be different, but that's not a big deal. When I later tested the tracks in the car I found that I had a more serious problem. If these seat track are the same as on the S-55, then the seats for cars with power seats had to be different than the manual seats. The parts manual does not tell anything about the seats, so I had no way to find out for sure. Anyway, the power seat tracks built about 1 3/4 inch ( 40 Millimeter) more than the manual tracks in t he height. So to get a normal ride height I figured would have to make modifications to the underside of the bucket seats so the power seat mechanism could be recessed up in the seat.
