Buying seats for a 50 year old van in my city is not easy. Much like the Sopru pop-top, these don't come up on Facebook groups or Marketplace often. We don't have large wreckers full of VW bus parts like other cities, so you take what you can get when it pops up and hope for the best. What followed was a long journey through three sets of seats before landing on the right ones.

Seat set 1, unknown original car

The first set I found were from an unknown car. They looked alright in the listing photos but buying sight unseen is always a gamble. When they arrived, they were filthy. I hit them with a carpet cleaner and what came out was genuinely disgusting. Years of grime, dust, and who knows what else.

After cleaning them up I started thinking about how to mount them. The problem was that the mounting points didn't line up with anything in the bus. I would have needed to fabricate custom brackets, and the seats themselves weren't even that comfortable. In hindsight, buying these was a huge mistake. Lesson learned, know exactly what you're buying before you commit.

Seat set 2, correct for my bus but in rough shape

I am glad I found these seats because they are actually correct for the year of my bus. I had to search so many posts on theSamba and Late Bay forums to figure out that the driver and passenger seats are different. They have a really unique but lackluster mounting mechanism and very limited adjustability.

Once I stripped them down to the bare frames I could see what I was working with. The spring bases were different between the two, one with a zigzag wire pattern and the other with coil springs. Both were rusty but structurally sound. The frames themselves were in decent shape once cleaned up. These seats taught me a lot about how the originals were built and what to look for.

End game seats, '76 with headrests

I found these seats through a fellow bus lover about two hours away. They're from a '76, so a couple of years newer than Daisy, but they have headrests which is exactly what I wanted for comfort and safety on long trips. The brown vinyl is in great condition and they look right at home in the bus.

The only catch was that the previous owner had cut through the seat rail mechanism when removing them from his bus, so he could use different seats. The rails were destroyed. I managed to track down a replacement set from another city and had them sent up. Once I compared the old cut rails with the new ones, I could see the damage. The new rails cleaned up nicely and everything bolted together.

Sitting in the bus with the final seats in place felt like a real milestone. They fit the era, they're comfortable, and they have headrests. Three sets of seats later and we got there in the end.

I have to finish replacing the left step, and the panel above it before I think about mounting the seats completely.