This project took me a good chunk of the weekend, but it's at least driveable now. My original seats were saddle leather and had degraded quite badly over the years. Found a pair of 2012 seats in a local boneyard that were in good shape and went to work. Replacement seats are black leather which I think look sharp in the black/tan interior. They're not perfect - though they're a huge improvement over the original seats - but nothing else in this car is either.
I don't have a welder and didn't want to spend money on custom tracks, while at the same time I'm not building a racer of any sort so I wanted my seats to still be adjustable. Hence I modified the seats to accept the old tracks as the floor pan is very different between SN95 and S197. This was possible with nothing more than a good drill and a high speed steel drill bit.
I did find the new seats sit quite a bit lower in the car than the old ones. Being 6'3" myself - and my wife 6'0" (and our 15 year old son 6'3" currently) - I actually appreciate sitting lower in the car. Others might not love that aspect as much - I actually felt the SN95 seats generally sat too high.
I do have power forward/reverse and up/down power working on the drivers side, and manual forward/reverse working on the passenger side. I do *not* have lumbar working on either. The 2012 seats appear to be at least heated - possibly heated and cooled - but I don't have that working either.
The power seat track removal from the 2012 driver's seat was not trivial. I found this video (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXDPfKyu5mY
) really helpful. The manual track from the SN95 is a two-piece affair, so getting it aligned was a bit of work. In hindsight I likely could have used the driver's side SN95 power seat track as a template for getting the new holes drilled correctly for the passenger side.
I don't have a welder and didn't want to spend money on custom tracks, while at the same time I'm not building a racer of any sort so I wanted my seats to still be adjustable. Hence I modified the seats to accept the old tracks as the floor pan is very different between SN95 and S197. This was possible with nothing more than a good drill and a high speed steel drill bit.
I did find the new seats sit quite a bit lower in the car than the old ones. Being 6'3" myself - and my wife 6'0" (and our 15 year old son 6'3" currently) - I actually appreciate sitting lower in the car. Others might not love that aspect as much - I actually felt the SN95 seats generally sat too high.
I do have power forward/reverse and up/down power working on the drivers side, and manual forward/reverse working on the passenger side. I do *not* have lumbar working on either. The 2012 seats appear to be at least heated - possibly heated and cooled - but I don't have that working either.
The power seat track removal from the 2012 driver's seat was not trivial. I found this video (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXDPfKyu5mY
) really helpful. The manual track from the SN95 is a two-piece affair, so getting it aligned was a bit of work. In hindsight I likely could have used the driver's side SN95 power seat track as a template for getting the new holes drilled correctly for the passenger side.
