Fitting Child Seats

[Livingstone]

Hi everyone.

After years of pestering, demanding, sulking, bribing and threatening divorce, my wife has given me the go ahead to buy a Morris Minor.
In the time that has passed since I first started on the persuasion path, we've had a new addition to the family - he's now 9 months old and about to get his first front-facing child seat.

Now, you could write what I know about cars, classic or otherwise, on the back of a digestive biscuit. So if anyone here wouldn't mind talking me through a few options that may be available to me;

My wife would prefer me to have the seats replaced for the more modern set-ups, head rests and all that -- front seats and back seats.
So, how'd I go about getting this done and could anyone throw out a quick estimate?

Also, she does have some concerns over safety - what most concerns her is the vehicle's ability to protect its passengers in a collision. Obviously these cars lack what would today be considered standard safety fittings and apparatus, but what amendments are possible to make the cars safer? (or at least make her feel that it's safer)

Thanks very much for any input.

Livingstone.

[youngcamper]

fitting metro seats is very simple, you can get bases from JLH for £80 a pair, the seats them selves are very cheap.

http://www.jlhmorrisminors.co.uk/store/ ... ductId=160

Fitting seat belts would be top of my priority list but in terms of safety wolselsy 9 inch drums or marina disks brakes would help these cost about £150 and £400 respectively.

Hope that helps

[rayofleamington]

Unless you're very cometent at DIY and have a good mechanical engineering 'feel' for what's right and not right then it's probably best to get rear seat belts fitted by a specialist.

It shouldn't be expensive as it only requires drilling 3 holes per belt and adding re-enforcement (some not-massive plates) at the bolt areas.

The Minor is actually a very safe car by 'old car' standards as long as occupants are seat-belted. Removal of the shelf under the dashboard should reduce the probability of broken legs in an accident about as far as the rest of it goes, the shell is well designed and absorbs impact better than you'd expect. The steering wheel deforms under high load so reduced occurence of broken wrists. Steering column itself is not up top modern standards so always wear a seatbelt to keep your torso away from it!
[Driver mortality rates were extremely high without seat belts as the steering column makes a good spear through the chest]


Decent brakes are worth having. I'm happy enough in a standard late Minor 1000 with the standard 8" brakes. The early (7") brakes are not as good. You can drive within the cars limits but there is no accounting for other drivers.

My daily driver Minor has disks and last week I may well have died without them when someone pulled across the front of me on a main road (I was doing 60). I had lots of stuff on the seats and was happy that picking the stuff up from the footwells was all I had to do!! That was thanks to being able to slow down as well as a modern car...
In a standard Minor I would be less likely to have been doing 60mph at that point anyway, especially when there was a car wanting to come out of a side road. At ~50 in a standard car I would also have avoided the accident.
The difference between 50mph and 60mph is approx 50% more kinetic energy to dissipate! Driving a slower/carefully mitigates the differences in brakes very easily but you only need to forget once.

Sorry for getting a bit fatalistic, but my massive near miss was less than a week ago! I've used Minors as daily drivers for at least half my driving years and that's quite a long time now. I think they are fabulous cars and there's nothing better than a standard Minor for making you appreciate 'driving pleasure'.
You can make the car go faster etc... but there's a lot of fun to be had by just relaxing and enjoying the journey instead.