Remembering Japanese cars from the past

My Carina: Celica Supra seats upgrade

I have always fancied the Toyota Corolla AE86 or Toyota Celica Supra seats as they are quite comfortable for OEM factory seats and still give enough support at the thighs and back when cornering.
My Carina: Celica Supra seat upgrade
In contrast the OEM Toyota Carina TA60 seats feels more like sitting on a buck of a carriage: too high and no support to be expected from any side. I regularly bumped by head against the ceiling if I took a speedbump too fast.

You probably get what I mean if you compare the two different seats with each other:
My Carina: Celica Supra seat upgrade
I was lucky to find a full set of Toyota Celica Supra seats in black including the rear seat as well and they are still in an incredible state! Not entirely new but not shabby at all and only a few minor scratches. Finding a set like this is a rare occasion so I happily grabbed the opportunity.

My Carina: Celica Supra seat upgrade
Installing the seats is the easiest part: Toyota standardized the seat rails in the early 80s so any seat from that era is interchangeable between the various models and the same applied to my Carina: the seat rails were a perfect fit!

The end result:
My Carina: Celica Supra seat upgrade
I can now sit in the car somewhere between 5 to 10 cm lower than before and that should fix the headroom issue. The seats are very very comfortable so for longer distances this should improve things a lot!

There are a few issues though: as I’m colorblind I did not realize my interior is a deep-dark brown color and I always interpreted it as black. However when installing the seat I realized I made an error. It doesn’t look too bad though.
Also the rear seat is shaped differently between the Carina and the Celica even though they are installed on the exact same spot. The Celica has some sort of moulding that stretches over the inner rear fender while the Carina seat is way higher and sits over the inner fender. So this is something I need to resolve with the spare parts from the Celica I’m breaking.
And the last issue is that the top part of the rear seat is discolored. It looks more or less blueish now so I need to find a way to dye this to black.

1 Comment

  1. Tore

    Hmm im trying ma61 seat in my ta60 now, the front left and right and rear right bolts are perfect fits but rear left is offset by 3mm so i cant get it in there.
    I guess not all that standardized :)

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