Today is Valentine’s Day so what better time to exoll some Lancia love?
Nothing happens around here unless there is a deadline and as the Aurelia is now booked in for a spray job the clock is ticking, everything I don’t want painted has to be removed. I have removed the front bench seat this morning and what a wonderful example of Lancia’s attention to detail the seat mechanism is.
Bench seats were popular in the 50’s and 60’s and they may have worked fine when they were new but usually the rails they “glided” on became clogged and it became a two person job to move them back or forward. You can assume that the Lancia accountancy department probably fitted in the understairs broom cupboard as the Lancia engineers had free rein to engineer everything, seating included.
Here is a picture of the underside of the front seat.
As you can see there is what appears to be a window winder (C), this when wound it will move a bell crank that has one end anchored via a link to the rhs floor (A) the other end (via red link D) to another bell crank that is anchored via a link to the lhs floor (B) so turning the handle pulls both sides of the seat equally so no jamming.
Lancia did go broke not long after this so now you know why.
