1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
I was kind of hoping for a good answer to paul de k's question as I was looking at skinning out a front passenger seat to get good leather for a driver's seat.
Not much on this site despite several searches, and I never checked out Quasimotors on the finnish copy site. I just plunged in. It's a lot of work, a long and thankless task, and I'm not sure it's worth it.
Some people have claimed on here to have done this job but they are remarkably short on details and they make light of it. It really calls for buckling down and not letting the darn thing win. It is not a job to make light of.
But anyways, for Ryan Goldade and others to come, herewith:
You have to pull or at least unbolt from the floor the seat or seats in question. Run seat all the way forward and remove two T45 Torx bolts in rear of rails, then run seat all the way backwards and remove the front two identical bolts. I needed a 3/8" breaker bar here as not much room for a ratchet; once cracked I found I could have come down from way above with a long extension, maybe with a wobble attachment, and I did just that to spin the cracked-loose bolt free on the inner side next to the hump; on door side it's not a straight shot and I had to do more hand loosening.
Then knobs, covers etc:
Pry off the electric seat adjusting knobs. Pry out the round cover at rear of black plastic side shroud. T25 will get the screw down in there, T10 gets a tiny screw under where front-back-tilt knob was, and another straight in from back. Then lift seat a bit, tilt that black shroud out from the bottom, and its top edge has a long tab on it that's tucked under the side skirt of the seat. Pull it free.
You ought to take the seat right out, as wrestling it around in place isn't fun and risks marking up the door sills and dirtying the rest of the upholstery. So you have to take the seat belt off:
Seat belt bolt head is hidden by a black plastic sliding cover along the rail. You could cut down thru this ahead of the bolt with a hacksaw or serated knife and bend it down out of the way but it comes out very easily:
Three T25 screws hold the seat adjusting switch pack onto the side frame and if you take those out the black plastic piece can be slid forward and let you at the seat belt bolt: 17mm with also a Torx T40 bit option in it.
At this time also pry out black plastic cap in center of "lumbar support" adjusting knob, and a T25 bit will remove the screw that holds knob on; also pull the black cup behind the knob.
Back to seat bottom: To free it up unplug it from the car; side nippers will take off the zip tie that holds that wiring down to the tin cover, then undo the two plugs.
Seat bottom skin is held at front by four hog rings, two thru a strip off the back of that little pouch, and two more under them holding the front of the long wire bail down to the wire of the seat frame. Grab and lock the hog rings with a vise grips, stick a small long screwdriver blade in the hog ring and pry open enough to spin them out.
Then there are nine of the long S-hooks holding the cover down: Two at rear holding the back flap down, two at back end of long horseshoe shaped wire that's held by "listings" off seat leather, giving shape to the depression of the seat, four on two cross wires that run across the above horseshoe, and three at front end of U.
I made a tool out of a small screw eye bent open into a hook, screwed into the end of a 3" stick of dowel, to help with these. Some you can get off just by pushing down on the seat from above. One of the rear ones is hidden by the seat heater wiring, so you need to snip another zip tie loose.
Once it's all free you can pry the wire and skin up over the cushion at the front, raise it up in the air, and the rear ends of the long heavy wire bail that holds its skirts down will unhook from the seat frame.
Its rear flap will pull out from the gap below the seat back.
The seat back is a special torture.
There are five hog rings holding two vinyl edges of front and rear flaps together along the bottom. Lock em into vise grips and stick a screwdriver in and pry them open, twist out of way.
Then two metal clips, one at each side, with tabs hooked into notches in the side frame at bottom. Stick a long screwdriver up inside the side flaps above the said clips from the front, and push down, that should stretch them downwards and let you unhook them.
Other posters have talked about peeling the seat skin back as you go up the back releasing its various fasteners. But if you're saving it this won't work as the seat back has that wire along it too, sewed into cloth pockets or "listing" all the way, and it doesn't bend inside out, you'd have to rip it or cut it free of the listing or cut through the wire with nips. This would mean you wouldn't be able to reinstall it with that clean sucked-in look of the original.
So from here on you'll be doing a lot of work with one arm jammed up inside the seat back's rear naugahyde cover, working blind, undoing fasteners it's almost impossible to get loose. The fun.
SIDE NOTE TO AERO OWNERS: Congratulations, this doesn't apply to you, as Recaro has sewn a long zipper up each side of the seat back giving access mere CS and CSE owners don't have.
Oh, here I'll digress and give you the how-to of removing the front seat headrests, which I did find on here after a search:
Kneel on front seat facing rear, pull headrest up to its stop, cram a hand in under it and grab top of seatback and pull down as far as you can. This will reveal the head of a Torx T25 headed sheet metal screw. Remove it, it's about 1 1/4" long, Headrest will then pull up and out, with spring clip. Then push in on the tab that's revealed at front with upholstery pushed down, and the black surround will also pop up and out.
To the seatback skin again:
You can release some of the 8 S-hooks by pushing hard in from the front, the other end will be freed up enough to unhook from the frame wire. The tool might be a help here, but I skipped it on the lower ones. There's two at bottom on lower ends of the long horseshoe wire, two each at each of the two wires at the cross seams, and two on the top of the curve of the U.
There are holes in the sheet of foam over the back where some of them come out. Others not so easily found. By the fingers of one hand, arm extended up inside the back.
Then at the top of the map pocket, the elastic strap continues around to the sides where loops on its ends are hooked on tabs on the frame.
THEN nearing top, there's a seat-wide horizontal strip of that nonwoven fabric like that at bottom edges of seat back, with a tough strip of vinyl at its edge, that is HOG-RINGED to a stiff paper-covered wire across the seat back frame, four hog rings, and there's no getting past it to the top two S-hooks without releasing the hog rings or cutting the fabric free from the seat skin.
By force of will I was able to reach up in there with a pair of 7" Vise Grips and eventually locate and lock them onto each of those hog rings, then twist the pliers and either bend open or break the hog rings.
That still left the two upper S-hooks, which come thru large holes in the steel seat back and hook into smaller holes below them.
I tried several times with my homemade tool, screw hook set into SIDE of the dowel for this, but even after once hooking the S-hook I gave up on it.
Then I moved on to a pair of needle nosed vise grips and managed to lock them onto the hooks a couple of times, reaching up INSIDE the black steel seat frame, but couldn't get enough motion to unhook the hooks.
So I worked at it a little more, got them set on the shorter leg of the hook where it goes around the horseshoe wire, and managed to bend that end of the S-hook out and get it to come off the wire.
THEN I wrestled the seatcover up over the foam and got it off.
If AND WHEN I ever go to strip the bad cover off my driver seat and put these back on, they either go on without benefit of S-hooks and hog rings, or, I've thought of an alternative, zip ties. One on the seat's wires, cinched around, long end sticking out, and at back of seat, stick a fender washer over the long end once I thread it thru, then put the latching end of another zip tie down onto the first one and pull till snug.
By the way the seat bottoms aren't a straight swap, the side skirts are longer on the inside and shortened up to go above the switches on the outside edge. And they need to be shaped just so to hold the wire bail that holds everything down. Could measure and get a shop to re-hem the longer side, and cut loose the hem and maybe add a loop or two of something on the shorter side to make it long enough to work on the inner side. More work than it's worth it seems - - just look in more junkyards for a good solid clean driver seat, I'd advise.
posted by 71.173.86...
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