Explorer Seat Swap

Got the F250 in the driveway for a much needed upgrade

The drive seat is whooped. Side panel broken, seat cushion shot, lumber bag turned to dust and fell out of the seat years ago. 

Its long overdue for replacement.  So lets get that seat out

Broke both outer bolts off, but the seat is out

...and here it is, next to the explorer seat i bought to replace it almost a year ago!  It looks even worse next to the replacement seat

So lets compare the seat bases.  The explorer seat is full power everything whereas the F250 seat only had a power lumbar bag so its quite different under there

Closeup of the two:

Not sure how challenging this is gonna be, but its gonna be easier if i can move the seat.  So that means weve got to fix the wiring

This is a simple enough fix; i just cut the plug off my original seat and spliced it onto the explorer seat

Next thing is to remove the mount for the fixed half of the seatbelt.  Im planning on reusing the original mount in the truck

Ok, much better

I cut the rivets and removed the seat base off the original seat, so i could see more easily how different they are

At first glance, they look like theyre way off

I figured theres not much use in speculating, lets just set the seat in the truck

Interestingly, with the rear right hole slipped over the locating stud, the rear mounts are surprisingly close to working with only some minor work to the rear left hole

up front isnt so great though

Looking at it, the seat has a ton of adjustment forward/backward

This also looks like itll be a lot easier to mount the seat too

So i went back to the original seat base and cut one of the mounting tabs off

The rough idea, this actually looks like itll be pretty easy to do

Trimmed a little bit of material off the explorer seat base

...and then welded that tab onto the frame

...and with that done....the seat is in!

The other 3 mounts laded flat on the floor, so i simply drilled new holes and bolted the seat down in place

Super comfy, and having all those adjusts is pretty sweet!  The seat matches the center jump seat pretty well; i think once i get the passenger seat swapped in it will be hard to tell i changed out the seats at all.

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