Howdy there Maxum3200,
As far as removing the Helm seat, (I hate to tell you) was the one of the worst experiences in dealing with modifications to Bella Sera. It starts out so simple right? How bad can it be? A few bolts and one beer and viola'! Done? Not so. What a cluster F' of a design. The seat is mounted with four stainless bolts holding the seat slider mechanism to the bottom the seat (which is made from uhmw type plastic sheet) with threaded inserts. Then the genius' attached the slider to cockpit fiberglass panel under the seat with four more bolts that extend into the aft cabin ceiling. (Wait for it now)
Sounds good so far, right? PROBLEM IS (Wait for it now!....)that they attached the seat before the headliner in the aft cabin was installed then covering them. Great! so when you turn the screw head from the top, the nut spins with it making it impossible to unbolt unless you put a wrench on the nut underneath which requires you to cut the head liner. There are so many examples of this on boats. The method of sequential fabrication they use cares rarely about how you are actually are gonna service the sucker.
ARGH! I musta spent at least half a day with a right angle ratcheting screw driver unscrewing the bolts that were at least 1 inch too long that were threaded into the seat bottom, (at least they had the sense to use threaded inserts in the seat bottom!) and there is absolutely ZE-RA-HO room for your hands to get even a 1/16 of a turn on the ratchet screw driver for each bolt. After using every swear word in the world to describe the moron that had anything to do with the way the seat went on, I finally got the damn seat off the slider base. If I was going to just reupholster the seat that would have fine until I had to put the seat back on but I was taking it off to install the scissor jack seat base I made. So that required me to deal with the previous issue of the spinning nuts, so I used a 4" abrasive cut off wheel mounted in my makita right angle grinder to cut the bolt heads off and left the flush headless bolts in since they were covered by the new seat base and just sealed them with 3M #5200marine sealant. The new seat base is held on with stainless sheet metal screws.
Anyway this is the result which posted previously but some new comers may not have seen it. Good Luck in getting that SOB off, I recommend having a freshly stocked beer cooler nearby to ease the inevitable tension this exercise will cause!
Bella Sera 3300SCR
3200 scr gets new upholstery
Linear Mode
