Home Built Air Ride Seats. Any Idea's?

[Birdsnest]

I have spring ride seats in my boat that frankly are nice in small chop but anything more than that I have to warn people to brace themselves for they bottom out and crush spines. I also have to replace all the springs in them by or tri yearly. Anyways they are no good.
The air ride seats available are VERY pricy so I was thinking the other day about making my current chairs into air ride seats using automotive air suspension bags. They would take a beating and you could pump them up with a bike pump to the desired pressure and they are cheap compared to the products available on the market. The only problem I see with using them would me a lack of Play in the ride of the seat. The ones I have now are have about 10 inches of play.
Looking for suggestions and ideas on how to make these from scratch but I will also be looking at modifying the ones I have to air bags but for the seats are great for they do so much in terms of swivelling and adjustments. I like to keep the chairs for sure.

Thanks in advance.

 

[TenMile]

There were a few guys, myself included who tried this type of suspension tractor seat. It worked very well. It was a spring coil / oil return with an adjustment for up to 300lbs.

Cheap and simple to install http://www.ebay.com/itm/W222BL-Blac...=BI_Heavy_Equipment_Parts&hash=item4cffdb2b10

 

[Franko Manini]

TenMile,
I am curious, did you, or could you mount this seat on a swivel pedestal? I like the idea of a suspension seat, but not at the cost of my swivel for fishing.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[TenMile]

TenMile,
I am curious, did you, or could you mount this seat on a swivel pedestal? I like the idea of a suspension seat, but not at the cost of my swivel for fishing.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yes you could do that. For mine, I actually removed the black tractor seat and replaced it with my white (more cushy) boat seat. If you wanted the actual seat to swivel it might be tricky as there is a sort of back support brace behind the seatback. But you could rig the swivel base below the suspension base and have the entire suspension mechanism swivel. It would likely take drilling a couple new holes in the suspension base.

I sold the boat that had this mechanism a few years back so can't look at it directly. There might be other ways mount the swivel. The chair base is an L shape that has a spring-load and hydraulic return mechanism so there are likely other options.