2012 Seats in 98 GT Convertible - pictures coming

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.

Here are some pictures showing the current setup. I pulled the seats from a 2012 convertible, but somewhere between 98 and 2012 Ford stopped using the bracket on the seat to guide the seat belt. These are a hair wider than the 98 seats but they do fit. My wife likes the black leather, and the contrast stitching. When she sat in them she realized what an improvement these are; she said she didn't realize before just how lousy the original seats were.

Bolting them directly in probably put them 2-3 inches lower than the old seats. Great for us taller folks. I do have power forward/reverse and power up/down working on the driver's seat, so if someone shorter were to drive it they could move it up.

This of course lead my wife to ask if we could install black seats in the rear. No luck finding such seats so far, and of course the rears of newer mustangs are wider - and hence don't fit.

Here are a couple pictures of the seats I removed. Previous owner had these poor quality seat covers on them. They certainly show their age. If anyone wants them they can have them, just pay the cost of getting them to you. All ready to go, with no tracks.