The Classic Ford Bronco

Ford built the early Bronco to be small enough to thread a trail and tough enough to win the Baja 1000, and for a few years in the late '60s and early '70s, it did both better than almost anything else on the market. That racing pedigree is still visible in the shape today: short wheelbase, tight turning radius, a boxy silhouette with nothing on it that doesn't need to be there. It's a truck built around capability first, and decades later, that honesty is exactly why people still want one.

What it was never built around was the driver's seat. The factory bench and buckets were thin, upright, and unforgiving even when new, a compromise Ford made in the name of keeping the truck light and simple. Restoring one rarely fixes that: the factory seats are expensive to bring back to original condition, and once finished, they're still the same seats that were never particularly comfortable to begin with.

A scheel-mann seat solves that without disturbing anything that makes the Bronco worth owning. The cabin is tight by modern standards, and our seats were sized and styled with exactly that in mind, understated enough to disappear into a stock-looking interior, with mechanical controls simple enough to match a truck that never asked for anything complicated.