Time to remove the 49's seat pedestal and seat tracks. I already knew the seat tracks were bad and I would not be able to use them, so the order was placed for two pair of seat tracks from Speedway. The Speedway tracks are about 1/2 the price of everyone else has, and they are probably not the best quality, but the reality is, once the seat is positioned, it likely won't be moving very often, if at all.
Pic 1, The 49's pedestal removed.
Pic 2, So this hole in the floor has an interesting story. It is an opening for a Dodge Factory option, heated seats! About 4" under this hole was where the exhaust pipe off the manifold ran. As an option, Dodge had a tubing that surrounded the exhaust with the back end closed around the pipe. the exhaust still flowed through the original pipe, the outer pipe just caught the hot air around the exhaust pipe. Then a duct went up into the cab where they installed a closable gate. When the gate was opened, the heated air from around the outside of the exhaust pipe was funneled through the duct work into the cab, under the seat. Since the seat sat on an enclosed metal pedestal, the captured heat would be bottled up under the seat and would warm the seat springs. Once the area was warm, the air could escape out from under the seat between the seat and the back of the cab. the gate lever controlled how much heated air entered the area under the seat. This particular truck didn't have the heated seat option, so Dodge installed a snap in cover.
Pic 3, As you can see in this pic, the snap in cover (on the right) didn't fair very well in this truck. I'm not going to have that kind of heated seats, so I welded the patch (on the left) to the floor covering the hole.
Pic 4, As you can see, I had a couple more patches to weld in as well.

This was about the time I thought would be a great time to put in seat belts along with the seats. Not just lap belts, but shoulder and lap belts. Stay tuned. Gene