Civic Seat Pan Swap - revisited
Seat pan swap revisited- Civic hatchback 1988-89 to 1990-91 upgrade.If you own either 1988 or 1989 STD or DX hatch, you probably already researched ways to ditch your regular seats for some nice Si seats from either 1989 or 1990-91 hatchback.
Hopefully you did your research, and you ended up doing the seat pan swap. But chances are that you ended up with the tilt lever on the opposite side. I spent some time today staring and staring at both of my 89Si and 90Si seat pans, and I decided to try The Other Method.
Justification:
I want lever to be on the outside, where it should be. I want my seats to be bolted in all four corners. I want it to look neat.
Tools needed:
12mm and 14mm wrench, grinder, drill with some sharp bit for spot welds, and finally - welder (yup! but there is an option!).
Here are both 1989 and 1990 pans side by side. Both of them are from a diver seat. Notice the difference in location of hinge bracket, rail bracket, also a stance of mounting rails. Pans alone are almost identical, including used and unused rivet holes. Note that 89Si bolt in perfectly to the floor of 1988 and 1989 STD hatchbacks (that’s what I have and tried).
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/89Si_pan.jpg
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/90Si_pan.jpg
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/89Si_90Si.jpg
My solution: Obviously for clean mounting and positioning in the car I need to retain the stance of the 89Si pan, but then the back support would not need my requirements (tilt lever). So I need to switch the hinge bracket to the other side. But then I would have the backrest mounted only on one side, so I also need to switch the bottom bracket that on 90Si is used to support tilting mechanism, as well as hinge and a floor-mounting rail. The hinge bracket is held in place by 4 spot welds (x) and 3 insanely sturdy rivets (o). The bottom bracket is held by 11(?) spot welds.
Here are both brackets before removal.
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/hinge_brkt.jpg
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/lever_brkt.jpg
Next step will be to remove hinge bracket from 89Si pan, and prep pen for welding. Now, if you don’t feel like welding, you can easily get away with just bolting both brackets to the pan. There are even predrilled holes that will help you with positioning both of those brackets, and it would look sorta like this:
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/brkt2_switch.jpg
http://radekonline.com/download/seats/brkt1_switch.jpg
Nov. 28, 2009 09:13