Mounting a fire extingisher

Mounting a fire extinguisher

My 964

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Why would you want a fire extinguisher?

Having noticed that even well-maintained cars can catch fire, and that fire tends to do a lot of damage in a very short amount of time, I figured that it might be prudent to mount a fire extinguisher in my car. Both to help suppress a fire in my own car (fingers crossed that that never happens), or to help put out someone else's fire.

Questions and answers

First question is, what fire extinguisher to get? On the one hand, the bigger it is, the better. I witnessed an engine fire on a tuned Golf on the Nürburgring, and the on-board fire extinguisher just wasn't big enough. It wasn't until somebody with a big-ass fire extinguisher came along that the fire could be put out once and for all. However, such a big fire extinguisher is difficult to mount, and lots of fires can be put out with a smaller fire extinguisher too. In the end I went with a 1kg extinguisher.

The second question is, where do you mount it? The usual locations seem to be

on the floor in front of the passenger seat
on a bracket that's attached to the mounting of the passenger seat
attached to the rollcage

Obviously, mounting something in front of the passenger seat involves drilling holes in the bottom of the car, and you need to find a decent solution for the carpet. Definitely not my favourite option.

Attaching a bracket to the passenger seat mounts would be a good way to go. The car can stay fully original, no drilling, no cutting up the carpet. It does limit the amount of seat travel.

Attaching the extinguisher to the rollcage is a fine solution if you have a rollcage. I don't.

A quick chat with my regular mechanic resulted in a fourth option: attaching the fire extinguisher to the frame of the passenger seat.

Compared to using a bracket that's attached to the seat mounting, the advantages are:

it doesn't limit the range of adjustment of the passenger seat
it's unobtrusive
the extinguisher is a little easier to reach from the driver's side

Of course, there are some downsides to this approach:

it doesn't support larger fire extinguishers
it requires drilling two holes in the seat frame. Not that anyone would notice, but it might matter if you wanted to win a a prize at a concourse.

All things considered it was the perfect solution for me.

Building the bracket

On a quiet Friday afternoon I dropped by Rennsport to get the work done. At least, it was a quiet afternoon for me; Lothar was very busy working on several cars. For starters, Lothar removed the plastic cover that hides the electric motors and loosened the passenger seat to get better access. A bit of measurement-taking later, it was time to cut a sturdy piece of metal down to the correct size and smoothing the edges.

Work was interrupted for a little while when Ben Kooymans came to pick up his racecar for a trip to Spa. That car sounds very nice, by the way. But I'm getting sidetracked.

A bit more measuring followed, a bit more cutting, and some welding, but then we were starting to see the basic shape of the bracket.

An angle-grinder was used to smooth out the welds, and then it was time to drill some holes.

As a finishing touch the bracket was spray-painted.

Installing the bracket

While the bracket was was drying, two holes that corresponded to the holes in the bracket were drilled in the seat frame. You can see the newly-drilled holes in the last picture: they're in front of the two electric motors.

The next step was attaching the bracket to the seat mount. As there's a little lip at the front of the mount, an extra nut was used on the underside to make the bracket clear the mount. The bracket that came with the fire extinguisher was riveted to the new seat-mount-bracket. As you can see it fits neatly next to the seat adjusting lever on the left.

The plastic cover was replaced...

...and the fire extinguisher itself was put in its new permanent home. As expected it fit perfectly, clearing both seat adjustment levers.