SEAT & BELT TIPS
Tip 1: In spite of your difficulty in locating drop-in foam pads, early seats are stronger and more desirable. They can be made adjustable in rake by the simple means of extending the slots in the back-stays, and if you add knobs to the fastening bolts, they become manually adjustable on-the-fly. This adds a large degree of custom- comfort over stock or the '73-up one-piece seats which often crack their frame welds. Extending the seat-back slots also allows the seat back to fold almost flat, making the firewall upholstery panel much easier to remove for access to the engine front cover.
Tip 2: there are two different lengths of seat rails (some 2-1/2" longer) which correspond to welded nuts under the floor. Seats interchange to rails but the rails do not interchange to a car.
Tip 3: If your floor is distorted at all, fore/aft seat adjustment will be more difficult. Do NOT remove the aluminum stand-offs and bolt rails directly onto the carpet. It compresses when you tighten the rail bolts and puts a bend in the adjustment rails, causing sticking during adjustment. Tall drivers often make this mistake; cut slots in the carpet if you need more headroom and want to remove the stand-offs.
Tip 4: the inside drivers seatbelt end between the seat and console can be made to 'stand up' for more convenient buckle insertion. There are decorative plastic sleeves used on Ford & GM belts that stiffen the belt enough, and can be trimmed to size with scissors and painted with a rattle-can to match the interior.
Tip 5 OEM seatbelt buckles sometimes disintegrate due to being held together under spring pressure only by the outer plastic trim. When it stress-cracks, the whole buckle falls apart. Pantera Parts Connection in NV rebuilds such buckles on an exchange basis & maintains your cars originality.
Tip 6: all Ford & GM seat belts are bolted to the floor with metric thread bolts. Late US domestic cars & pickups use the same thread as Panteras but with spline-drive round-head screws. Take spline socket adapters and a ratchet wrench to the junkyard when looking for belt parts. Late round head screws either eliminate the often-lost plastic Pantera caps, or if yours are still around, the decorative caps fit better over round head screws (with RTV).
Tip 7: the plastic adjuster knobs on seat adjustment rails often get cracked from being kicked. The knobs are identical to those used on some Datsun cars & mini-pickups, or the vendors carry replacements.
Tip 8: its pretty simple to make a pair of seat mounting shims of 3" wide x 13" long x 1/4" steel or aluminum strap and reposition the whole seat sideways. This can remove most or all of the stock offset in the drivers seat position relative to the steering wheel, and by shifting the passenger seat outboard, taller passengers get a bit more leg room at full stretch.
Tip 9- The stock seat adjustment rails slide on rubber coated steel wheels. Over time the rubber flat-spots, forcing the wheels to slide rather than roll. This makes the flat spots worse and contributes to adjustment difficulty. Home made metal substitute rollers tend to rattle but hard plastic substitutes are easy to make and do not rattle. The vendors sell such things as well.
There are others for specific situations. Extra comfort & convenience for pennies goes a long way with slightly modified early 3-piece seats, without swapping the whole seat for some other high-priced brand that may have its own problems.