bucket seat/steering wheel clearance, springover report

[Curt Cleavinger <rcleavin@domain.elided>]

Hello Binders!
  I acquired a set of bucket seats and bases that came out of a 1980 Scout. I
pulled the bench seat out of my Scout, and put the buckets in place. Then I
noticed that the bottom of the steering wheel is only 4 or 5" above the top of
the seat. It's entirely possible that the Scout the seats came out of had a 
tilt steering column, but buckets were available in Scouts without tilt steering
columns, weren't they? Were the seat bases or seats different heights depending
on whether the Scout had the tilt option? My steering wheel is the standard one
I've seen on lots of Scouts (15"??) - I know smaller steering wheels were available, 
but they're not that much smaller are they? 

Springover status report:
The springover is going well - I should be ready to bolt up the axles this weekend. 
I took all of the leaf springs apart and drilled out the center pin holes to accept a 
larger (3/8") center pin (I'm doing this because I broke one of the stock 5/16" center 
pins last year). I went to National Spring over the weekend and got new 5/8" thick 
U-bolts made, and got some new spring clamps. Tuesday night I made new u-bolt 
plates (easier than redrilling the old ones, and I'm not going to mount the shocks to
the u-bolt plates). I ordered brake lines from Jim Maulis last night (I'm also moving the 
hard line connections down 3-4"). I removed the bump stops and front upper shock 
mounts from the frame (I'm sure I'll need to move the bump stops down to clear the 35s 
and I'll also align them directly under the frame instead of outboard of it. I'll make some 
shock hoops for an upper shock mount to fit longer shocks for more travel. I picked 
up my tires/rims yesterday (I went with BFG MTs) - the 35s sure do look big :-)

Later,
  Curt