Making Adjustments to Sedan Rear Seat in my 96 Wagon.

So while I love my sedan rear seat mod on my '96 Roady wagon, the seatback has never "sat" as upright or as far back as I've liked.   There was a gap between the seatback and the doorsill/inner fender trim...gap can be seen here:


I took the seat out today and modified the lower pivots and the latch rod, and the seat sits back further now, and it fits SO MUCH better!


I do LOVE this mod, even more-so now that it "fits" really well!





It was actually 90-degrees here in Round Rock today, in November...wild even for Texas.   HAD to get outside and tinker with my favorite toy!


Save the Whales Gang!

-Texas Mike

You may have gained a couple of inches of foot room as well.

It looks great . But I thought it looked nice the first time lol .

One of my favorite mods! Some folks have asked, and no, it does not lay flat anymore. To make it lay flat, I would need to notch out the lower corners of the seatback, like on the stock wagon seat. I just don't want to cut up that beautiful seat with big notches! This car is a weekend toy now, and only hauls people, but if you DID want to notch yours, you could retain the folding feature. Mine will release and lean forward a bit, but that's all.

-Mike

81X11 wrote:

One of my favorite mods!   Some folks have asked, and no, it does not lay flat anymore.   To make it lay flat, I would need to notch out the lower corners of the seatback, like on the stock wagon seat.   I just don't want to cut up that beautiful seat with big notches!  This car is a weekend toy now, and only hauls people, but if you DID want to notch yours, you could retain the folding feature.   Mine will release and lean forward a bit, but that's all.

-Mike

Could you post a pic of how far it will fold? That's a mod I'm still thinking about, but I still need to occasionally use my wagon (carefully!) as a wagon.

I don't force-fold it because it wrinkles the leather on the lower corners when you do.  I'm trying to keep mine as nice as possible, but here is the seat folded in Ben's (Silverfox's former) 94 Roady. You can see how the lower leather corners of the seat are getting crushed in this pic. I won't do this to mine! I would cut the corners if I needed the seat to fold.


And up:



If you do this mod, just plan to cut out the lower corners like the stock wagon seat was, and then it will fold down...it just won't look as nice.   See the comparison below and especially look at the lower corners.






You can really see the difference here:



In these pics you can see the black seatback from the wagon installed on the sedan.   You can really tell how much BIGGER and WIDER the sedan seatback is than the wagon.   If you look, you can see the cutout area in the lower corners.  All that foam and leather would need to be removed there in order to make the sedan seat fold down well.   I just could not bring myself to remove all that.  



ALSO, you can see here how I trimmed the black plastic backing even further in order to get the Sedan seat to sit as far back is possible IN the car, and be "flush" with the door openings.   When I was doing the original test-fitting, the Sedan seat was so much thicker that it sat over the lower seat cushion and gave the car less legroom.     No joke!    I also had peel the leather back on the upper corners and bend/cut some of the seat frame in order to get the seatback to sit back all the way in order to latch correctly.  The Sedan seat is WIDE compared to the Wagon seat.



After a lot of tweaking and test-fitting, I then took the Frankenstein seatback to my interior guy and had him sew the car carpet backing from the wagon seat onto the back.   It still has the zipper on the bottom so I can un-zipp and tweak the inner works as needed...which is what I did at the start of this new thread...adjusting again for a better fit.



I do love this mod.  It looks SO MUCH BETTER than stock, and is a LOT more comfy, especially with the fold-down center armrest.



A couple other things to note. The Sedan seatbottom just snaps right in like it was meant to be there. It requires no mods, but the seatbelts in the stock wagon seats come THROUGH slots in the seat bottom. The Sedan seatbottom has no slots, on the sedan the belts come between the upper and lower seats. I made this happy discovery when I went to put the seats in the last time, and discovered the belts were too short. I ended up cutting out the metal bracket from some spare belts I had, and bolting a bare bracket to the bracket on the bottom of my wagon belts, which gave me about another 6-inches of length to the belts, and now they fit fine. I DO plan to measure the wagon belts and will see if the Sedan belts are actually longer when I go yarding sometime...I just keep forgetting to do it. I don't know if the Sedan belts are longer, or if they just mount in a different location in the sedans.

Have fun those who dare to do this mod! It's totally worth it!

-Mike

Hey Mike, did you by any chance make a thread about swapping front sedan seats into a RMW? Is it pretty much a bolt-in deal?

Front seats will bolt right in, yes.