The Complete DIY for Twisted Seat Repair!

doc$holliday · Jun 24, 2010

Okay, so I learned two things the hard way recently: First, if you are going to do the twisted seat repair, do everything possible to get it right the FIRST time because repeating all this 3x is a major PITA. Second, if you are going to do a writeup about it, do it in Word and then copy it into the thread...because if your computer reboots, you lose everything you typed. Ugh.

Enough about all that. I know I took a LOT more photos but I'm having trouble locating some of them now, so I will just have to go with what I've got here. I'm going to go through this procedure as it pertained to me, which is to say that I had to do the full Monty on this repair. There are several places where you may get lucky and not have to do all these steps. Let's just say that a simple "look under the seat, heat up the black wire and pull it out" fix did NOT work for me.

A note about airbags (SRS): I had no issues with this. Make sure you leave the key in the house or whatever and do NOT insert it at any time when your seat is unplugged. Follow that and you'll be fine. Also note that the power seats and such only operate for a certain amount of time, say 15-20 mins, when a door is initially opened and there are no keys in the ignition. So if at any point you are wondering "why don't my seat controls work?", it could be that your doors have been open for too long, just shut them, reopen and resume.

What you will most likely need: A socket wrench and assorted size sockets, a smaller flat-blade screwdriver, various pliers, possibly a cordless drill, an 8mm box wrench (one that ratchets if you have it!), a plastic level, something to heat with (I prefer a small handheld butane torch from Home Depot, works absolutely perfectly for $15 or whatever and looks like a small gun), razor knife, someplace clean to set your seat, and probably a helper elf to pull this heavy-@ss seat out of the Beast.

Summary of the issue: the reason your seat is twisting (half of it is raising, or tilting back, or whatever) is because all of the motions that are available are controlled by motors underneath. Each silver motor has two black cables running into it (one on each side) and each cable does half the seat. Inside the black, plasticky insulation is actually a mechanical cable with ridges in it. Something inside the motor clamps onto those ridges and physically spins the cable (inside the black insulation), creating a winding motion and moving the seat. One of your motors has lost half of its spinning, which means the mechanical cable has become "disconnected". What you are looking to do now is to pull that cable out, cut back the insulation to allow more of the cable to push into the motor, and reinsert so that the motor spins both halves of the seat together again. Sounds easy, right??

First, try to manipulate the controls of the seat such that everything is in "normal" position. In other words, the seat bottom and seat back are level. Sure, they may not be where you want them (since you were trying to move the seat in the first place, right?) but just get them level.

Step 1: Seat Removal - Raise the seat vertically to allow easier access to removing it. If you have never removed your seat before, you need to take out the metal stopper piece in the seat track behind the driver's seat. Ignore this if you are working on your passenger seat. The stopper is in the right side track, here is a pic:

Now you can move the seat all the way back to access the bolts in the front. There are two in the front and two in the back, all size 13mm or whatever it is. The ones in the back are protected, pull aside the plastic like this:

While you are underneath there, you need to disconnect the seat belt. Here is a photo of the bolt you need to remove, after which the belt will pull up through the plastic trim and separate from the seat (it stays hanging in the car):

Now, in the same area (lower left behind seat, for the driver side) you need to remove the seat belt tensioner pin. It's sort of like a cotter-pin, you'll figure it out. This thing is what keeps tension on the seatbelt as the seat moves forward and back. Here's a closesup:

Okay, there is only one more thing to do in order to get the seat out of the car (or, if you are feeling lucky and want to attempt it, you can try to do the repair while your seat is merely laying all the way back so you can access underneath it while working in the footwell area. Personally, I don't recommend it. Anyhow, the one thing is to disconnect the power cable to the seat. This will erase your memory seat settings, as they are kept in the seat, not in the buttons on the door.

Here is a picture of the cable:

Before you pull this cable out and disconnect seat power, let me say this: you really prefer to have the seat raised to max vertical height before taking it from the car. It will make your work on the motors easier. Also, it may be good to tilt the seat back and disconnect a motor or two to figure out which one operates the seat function that is messed up. Do this now before you pull power and take the seat out.

Step 2: Motors and cables
I def wish I had those other pics, they were much better at showing the entire bottom side of the seat. If I find them later, I'll edit this thread. Anyways, now you have the seat out and flipped upside down. You need to know which motor of the 3 is controlling the seat function that is twisting up. I'm running out of time for now so I'll assume you found out which one it is. Here is a pic, there are two motors in this one: one is middle right side, between the two large black support bars and the other is in the upper right corner. You can see the black cable going into it pretty clearly.

Each motor has 4 screws, they are 8mm I think. They will be very difficult to get at, in some cases. Those screws HAVE to be loosened at least somewhat in order to pull the black cable (with metal tip) out of the motor. Having those 4 screws tightened down is what locks the cable into the motor. You will need to bend some of the seat's metal tabs out of the way to access some screws, you'll see what I mean. The alternative is that if you want to try to heat up the black cable near the motor, and pull it out to work on it while leaving the metal tip embedded in the motor, you can try. It's going to be difficult but some people got lucky with that, aka anyone that was able to just get under their seat, heat it up with a lighter and do the repair. Good luck with that.

Here is a photo where I have bent a tab, removed some screws and pulled out the cable:

Here is what the cable looks like:

You need about a half inch of the metal ridged cable exposed in order for the motor to grip it properly. Once you find yours, odds are that it's shortened to about 1/4" or less exposed. Use your heat source to heat up the metal tip and pliers to pull it up and off the black insulation. Yes, this can be a real PITA. Keep at it. Trust me, that butane torch is awesome for this. Use a razor knife to cut away the black insulation to get the proper amount exposed. Then you have to heat it up again and reattach the metal tip. Once it's ready, plug it back in the motor and reassemble whatever you took apart.

In theory, that should do it and you should be able to reverse all this to complete the procedure. HOWEVER, that may not be it. Here are additional issues that can come up:

1) you were unable to get the seat level previously and so now the two halves of the motor are not synced up right. This happened to me, I put it all back together and found that one buttcheek was sitting at least a half inch lower than the other. This will eventually drive you crazy. So, you need to re-sync the two motor halves. What you can do is all the above, make sure the black cable is all repaired and ready. Before reattaching to motor, put the seat back in the car. Make sure it is in the exact proper location where all the bolts are aligned. Why? Because the seat is weird, trust me on this one, if you are going to level it you ONLY want to do it when it's in the car in its normal spot. Otherwise, what is "level" on your garage floor won't be level in the car. I found this out the hard way.

So, you have put the seat back in the car with the black cable hanging loose. Pull it out so you can get at it, grab your cordless drill and wind that sucker (whichever way it is) until you get stuff leveled. Here is a pic to help you envision this:

2) now it's leveled out. Take seat back out, reattach cable to motor, reassemble everything, put back in car, finish it all off and you should be good.

Okay, that's all for now, I gotta go catch a flight to Vegas for the weekend. I hope that helps some of you guys, send me a PM if you need anything and I should get it via my email.

cheers :cheers:

Sean Paul

vantaam5 · Jun 24, 2010

Thanks alot for the DIY!
Good to know when the seat fails one day!:cheers:

CapeCodM5 · Jun 24, 2010

Thank You

Another very helpful DIY post. :cheers:

if lookz kill · Jun 24, 2010

very very nice DIY with good pictures. i will be doing this over this weekend so this came at a great time. thanks!

b757236 · Jun 24, 2010

Take the seat out...it is much easier!

tyroone · Sep 3, 2010

great DIY

great i will be doing this on my passenger seat. but i have a question i dont know if this is related to the subject or not. i took my car to the detail shop the ther day to clean the car from the inside but everything was fine in the car. the seat was ok and no problem what so ever in the car. but when i got it back, i found out that the airbag is on and when sat on the passenger side, found out that it is twisted. does the airbag light has something to do with the seat? i am affraid that they tried removing the seat that is where the cable got dissconneted and the airbag light came on....

any idea?

cheers

AMP · Sep 3, 2010

tyroone said:
great i will be doing this on my passenger seat. but i have a question i dont know if this is related to the subject or not. i took my car to the detail shop the ther day to clean the car from the inside but everything was fine in the car. the seat was ok and no problem what so ever in the car. but when i got it back, i found out that the airbag is on and when sat on the passenger side, found out that it is twisted. does the airbag light has something to do with the seat? i am affraid that they tried removing the seat that is where the cable got dissconneted and the airbag light came on....

any idea?

cheers

Most likely they removed the seat and then turned on the ignition while the seat was out.

There are three SRS (airbag) related items in the seats.

The first is the occupancy detector which determines if someone is in the seat and if so fires the airbag for that seat.

The second is the sensor to detect whether or not the seatbelt is fastened.

The third is the firing circuit for the belt pre-tensioner. This system fires a small explosive charge that retracts the seatbelt buckle toward the floor of the car should there be an impact.

If the car detects a fault in any of these items it will store a code and activate the airbag light in the cluster. In your case it was the fact that the seat was likely unplugged when the key was turned on. The only way to clear the light is to correct the problem and clear the codes with an appropriate code reader. Most generic tools can't clear airbag codes so you may need to take a trip to your mechanic. If there's a cost involved then I would ask the detailer to cover it.

AMP · Sep 3, 2010

As an aside here.... you can power the entire seat out of the car to test everything and make sure that it's functioning properly.

On the harness connector to the seat you'll see a number of different sized pins. The two largest blade type pins are the power feed. If you pop the hood off of the back of the connector you'll find a brown wire and a red/yellow wire feeding these pins. Brown is ground and red/yellow is B+. Make up some short cables using female slip-on spades (to slide onto the pins in the harness connector) and connect the other end to a 12V power source (I use a jumper pack). At this point you can operate all of the seat controls and make sure that it's all working before re-installing the seat in the car.

Normally I would post pin numbers, but I'm taking a long weekend and don't have the wiring diagrams here.

I usually use a heat gun (as you would use for heat-shrink tubing or stripping paint) to get the barrels off of the cables.

doc$holliday · Sep 9, 2010

Good info on powering the seat outside of the vehicle. The only thing to remember is that the seat sitting on the floor of your garage does not equal the seat as placed on the rails inside the car. This method to power it is great if you already know you have the two motors properly aligned and would like to test it out before putting the seat back in the Beast!

Thanks for the good tip.
SP

primeral · Sep 3, 2010

I'm having to do this operation a 2nd time, now on both seats. Thanks for the great pictures!

edit: instead, I'm considering some recaros hehe

tradin1 · Sep 3, 2010

you dont need to remove the cord out of the plug, thats extra unnecessary work. when you determine which cord it is you need to lengthen, you can carefully cut off a half inch of the black cover AROUND THE METAL INSIDE THE COVER, and you are done.

much quicker doing it that way, i helped hdhntr do his at adams last weekend and he will tell you it only took 20-30 minutes max.

doc$holliday · Sep 9, 2010

So you're saying you were able to leave the cord completely plugged into the motor and connected to its metal tip, yet cut away the black insulation and somehow push the cable further into the metal tip? Sounds interesting but I'm a little confused by the description here. Although certainly some people have gotten more lucky than others with this DIY, sometimes those cables only need a little heat and sometimes they are a real PITA.

SP

Hdhntr23 · Sep 17, 2010

doc$holliday said:
Okay, so I learned two things the hard way recently: First, if you are going to do the twisted seat repair, do everything possible to get it right the FIRST time because repeating all this 3x is a major PITA. Second, if you are going to do a writeup about it, do it in Word and then copy it into the thread...because if your computer reboots, you lose everything you typed. Ugh.

Enough about all that. I know I took a LOT more photos but I'm having trouble locating some of them now, so I will just have to go with what I've got here. I'm going to go through this procedure as it pertained to me, which is to say that I had to do the full Monty on this repair. There are several places where you may get lucky and not have to do all these steps. Let's just say that a simple "look under the seat, heat up the black wire and pull it out" fix did NOT work for me.

A note about airbags (SRS): I had no issues with this. Make sure you leave the key in the house or whatever and do NOT insert it at any time when your seat is unplugged. Follow that and you'll be fine. Also note that the power seats and such only operate for a certain amount of time, say 15-20 mins, when a door is initially opened and there are no keys in the ignition. So if at any point you are wondering "why don't my seat controls work?", it could be that your doors have been open for too long, just shut them, reopen and resume.

What you will most likely need: A socket wrench and assorted size sockets, a smaller flat-blade screwdriver, various pliers, possibly a cordless drill, an 8mm box wrench (one that ratchets if you have it!), a plastic level, something to heat with (I prefer a small handheld butane torch from Home Depot, works absolutely perfectly for $15 or whatever and looks like a small gun), razor knife, someplace clean to set your seat, and probably a helper elf to pull this heavy-@ss seat out of the Beast.

Summary of the issue: the reason your seat is twisting (half of it is raising, or tilting back, or whatever) is because all of the motions that are available are controlled by motors underneath. Each silver motor has two black cables running into it (one on each side) and each cable does half the seat. Inside the black, plasticky insulation is actually a mechanical cable with ridges in it. Something inside the motor clamps onto those ridges and physically spins the cable (inside the black insulation), creating a winding motion and moving the seat. One of your motors has lost half of its spinning, which means the mechanical cable has become "disconnected". What you are looking to do now is to pull that cable out, cut back the insulation to allow more of the cable to push into the motor, and reinsert so that the motor spins both halves of the seat together again. Sounds easy, right??

First, try to manipulate the controls of the seat such that everything is in "normal" position. In other words, the seat bottom and seat back are level. Sure, they may not be where you want them (since you were trying to move the seat in the first place, right?) but just get them level.

Step 1: Seat Removal - Raise the seat vertically to allow easier access to removing it. If you have never removed your seat before, you need to take out the metal stopper piece in the seat track behind the driver's seat. Ignore this if you are working on your passenger seat. The stopper is in the right side track, here is a pic:

Now you can move the seat all the way back to access the bolts in the front. There are two in the front and two in the back, all size 13mm or whatever it is. The ones in the back are protected, pull aside the plastic like this:

While you are underneath there, you need to disconnect the seat belt. Here is a photo of the bolt you need to remove, after which the belt will pull up through the plastic trim and separate from the seat (it stays hanging in the car):

Now, in the same area (lower left behind seat, for the driver side) you need to remove the seat belt tensioner pin. It's sort of like a cotter-pin, you'll figure it out. This thing is what keeps tension on the seatbelt as the seat moves forward and back. Here's a closesup:

Okay, there is only one more thing to do in order to get the seat out of the car (or, if you are feeling lucky and want to attempt it, you can try to do the repair while your seat is merely laying all the way back so you can access underneath it while working in the footwell area. Personally, I don't recommend it. Anyhow, the one thing is to disconnect the power cable to the seat. This will erase your memory seat settings, as they are kept in the seat, not in the buttons on the door. Here is a picture of the cable:

Before you pull this cable out and disconnect seat power, let me say this: you really prefer to have the seat raised to max vertical height before taking it from the car. It will make your work on the motors easier. Also, it may be good to tilt the seat back and disconnect a motor or two to figure out which one operates the seat function that is messed up. Do this now before you pull power and take the seat out.

Step 2: Motors and cables
I def wish I had those other pics, they were much better at showing the entire bottom side of the seat. If I find them later, I'll edit this thread. Anyways, now you have the seat out and flipped upside down. You need to know which motor of the 3 is controlling the seat function that is twisting up. I'm running out of time for now so I'll assume you found out which one it is. Here is a pic, there are two motors in this one: one is middle right side, between the two large black support bars and the other is in the upper right corner. You can see the black cable going into it pretty clearly.

Each motor has 4 screws, they are 8mm I think. They will be very difficult to get at, in some cases. Those screws HAVE to be loosened at least somewhat in order to pull the black cable (with metal tip) out of the motor. Having those 4 screws tightened down is what locks the cable into the motor. You will need to bend some of the seat's metal tabs out of the way to access some screws, you'll see what I mean. The alternative is that if you want to try to heat up the black cable near the motor, and pull it out to work on it while leaving the metal tip embedded in the motor, you can try. It's going to be difficult but some people got lucky with that, aka anyone that was able to just get under their seat, heat it up with a lighter and do the repair. Good luck with that.

Here is a photo where I have bent a tab, removed some screws and pulled out the cable:

Here is what the cable looks like:

You need about a half inch of the metal ridged cable exposed in order for the motor to grip it properly. Once you find yours, odds are that it's shortened to about 1/4" or less exposed. Use your heat source to heat up the metal tip and pliers to pull it up and off the black insulation. Yes, this can be a real PITA. Keep at it. Trust me, that butane torch is awesome for this. Use a razor knife to cut away the black insulation to get the proper amount exposed. Then you have to heat it up again and reattach the metal tip. Once it's ready, plug it back in the motor and reassemble whatever you took apart.

In theory, that should do it and you should be able to reverse all this to complete the procedure. HOWEVER, that may not be it. Here are additional issues that can come up:

1) you were unable to get the seat level previously and so now the two halves of the motor are not synced up right. This happened to me, I put it all back together and found that one buttcheek was sitting at least a half inch lower than the other. This will eventually drive you crazy. So, you need to re-sync the two motor halves. What you can do is all the above, make sure the black cable is all repaired and ready. Before reattaching to motor, put the seat back in the car. Make sure it is in the exact proper location where all the bolts are aligned. Why? Because the seat is weird, trust me on this one, if you are going to level it you ONLY want to do it when it's in the car in its normal spot. Otherwise, what is "level" on your garage floor won't be level in the car. I found this out the hard way.

So, you have put the seat back in the car with the black cable hanging loose. Pull it out so you can get at it, grab your cordless drill and wind that sucker (whichever way it is) until you get stuff leveled. Here is a pic to help you envision this:

2) now it's leveled out. Take seat back out, reattach cable to motor, reassemble everything, put back in car, finish it all off and you should be good.

Okay, that's all for now, I gotta go catch a flight to Vegas for the weekend. I hope that helps some of you guys, send me a PM if you need anything and I should get it via my email.

cheers :cheers:

Sean Paul

tradin1 said:
you dont need to remove the cord out of the plug, thats extra unnecessary work. when you determine which cord it is you need to lengthen, you can carefully cut off a half inch of the black cover AROUND THE METAL INSIDE THE COVER, and you are done.

much quicker doing it that way, i helped hdhntr do his at adams last weekend and he will tell you it only took 20-30 minutes max.

doc$holliday said:
So you're saying you were able to leave the cord completely plugged into the motor and connected to its metal tip, yet cut away the black insulation and somehow push the cable further into the metal tip? Sounds interesting but I'm a little confused by the description here. Although certainly some people have gotten more lucky than others with this DIY, sometimes those cables only need a little heat and sometimes they are a real PITA.

SP

tradin1 said:
you cut off a piece of the rubber insulation in the middle of the line, and once you cut it, it pushes itself in by itself, slap some black tape on there to keep it together, and its good as doing it your way.

doc$holliday said:
Ahh I get what you're saying. That sounds even better and I'll give it a shot on my passenger side one of these days. thanks!

SP

Sean Paul,

Really an awesome post here.

Tradin1 is right, he did mine and it took 15 minutes. It took him about the same amount of time to fix it as it took me to remove the 4 bolts for him to work on it and put them back in. I truly was amazed.

I not only thank him for it but my wife does too now that she doesnt have to sit in a twisted seat.

Thanks Tradin1!

tyroone · Sep 27, 2010

hi tradin1,

sorry for asking but do u mind showing me how u can do that? if pictures available that would be super. yet, let me ask you this,

only cut anywhere in the middle of the cable and that is it? and then wrap it with tape and i am good to go? so no need for me to remove the seat or unplug the cable. how is that possible? how is this possible what effect does cutting anywhere in the cable fixes the tilt?

sorry once again

cheers

primeral · Sep 27, 2010

tyroone, I'm not tradin1 but I just recently had tremendous success using his method, so I will put in my two cents.

1) seat doesn't need to be level at the time of repair, you can worry about it later

2) if you haven't done it before, it might be difficult for you to see which cables need repairing. You will need to unbolt the seat from the floor of the car to at least have the ability to tilt the entire seat backwards so you can look underneath. I couldn't work like that, so I put towels over my steering wheel and door trim to protect them from scratches during seat extraction. Be careful because the seat is relatively large and heavy.

3) Once you've identified which cable needs fixing, pick the best spot on the black sheathing / jacket where you have access to manipulate it. I think a good tool for doing this is with a wire stripper, and using the 14 gauge stripper. You aren't supposed to cut the cable underneath, just the black insulating jacket. Anywhere between 2-3cm from that cut make another cut. Then use a sharp utility knife to join the two cuts so you can peel that 2-3cm of jacketing off.

4) From here you can pull the metal cable from the motor completely, with its part of the black jacket intact, and use a portable drill to twist the metal cable to level the seat out.

5) It is a good idea to move the seat back into the vehicle to have it sit properly and you can perform some fine tuning with matching the heights or reclination. Don't bolt the seat back up yet, you will need to tilt the seat back to complete the job.. Again, use the exposed cable and a portable drill. Once it's nice, put the metal cable back into the black jacket, into the motor. Since you removed 2-3cm of jacket, the metal cable should now have the ability to be inserted 2-3cm farther into the motor.

6) Connect the seat's electrical connector to the seat. While making sure the two cut ends are butted together with one hand, try to use the seat switch to see if both sides move in unison. It's just a matter of motor turning cable turning gear.

7) Once you are satisfied with this, you need to permanently attach both ends of the cable to each other. A crimped ferrule or metal sleeve or something would be my prime choice, but I didn't have one handy so I used packaging tape. It's ghetto, but it's nowhere near as ghetto as the gangsta lean a twisted seat provides. Clear packing tape worked well for me, and it had good adhesion.

8) Disregard females

9) Acquire currency

doc$holliday · Sep 27, 2010

primeral said:
1) seat doesn't need to be level at the time of repair, you can worry about it later

2) if you haven't done it before, it might be difficult for you to see which cables need repairing. You will need to unbolt the seat from the floor of the car to at least have the ability to tilt the entire seat backwards so you can look underneath. I couldn't work like that, so I put towels over my steering wheel and door trim to protect them from scratches during seat extraction. Be careful because the seat is relatively large and heavy.

3) Once you've identified which cable needs fixing, pick the best spot on the black sheathing / jacket where you have access to manipulate it. I think a good tool for doing this is with a wire stripper, and using the 14 gauge stripper. You aren't supposed to cut the cable underneath, just the black insulating jacket. Anywhere between 2-3cm from that cut make another cut. Then use a sharp utility knife to join the two cuts so you can peel that 2-3cm of jacketing off.

4) From here you can pull the metal cable from the motor completely, with its part of the black jacket intact, and use a portable drill to twist the metal cable to level the seat out.

5) It is a good idea to move the seat back into the vehicle to have it sit properly and you can perform some fine tuning with matching the heights or reclination. Don't bolt the seat back up yet, you will need to tilt the seat back to complete the job.. Again, use the exposed cable and a portable drill. Once it's nice, put the metal cable back into the black jacket, into the motor. Since you removed 2-3cm of jacket, the metal cable should now have the ability to be inserted 2-3cm farther into the motor.

6) Connect the seat's electrical connector to the seat. While making sure the two cut ends are butted together with one hand, try to use the seat switch to see if both sides move in unison. It's just a matter of motor turning cable turning gear.

7) Once you are satisfied with this, you need to permanently attach both ends of the cable to each other. A crimped ferrule or metal sleeve or something would be my prime choice, but I didn't have one handy so I used packaging tape. It's ghetto, but it's nowhere near as ghetto as the gangsta lean a twisted seat provides. Clear packing tape worked well for me, and it had good adhesion.

8) Disregard females

9) Acquire currency

LOL! Damn Primeral, love your 9-step program here for the twisted seats! Really great summary man, glad more peeps have tried out Tradin1's method and found success. I'm definitely doing that for my passenger seat sometime soon. With some of my pics and your description, anybody should be able to handle this one.
Cheers bro :cheers:

Sean Paul

primeral · Sep 27, 2010

Don't leave out Steps 8 and 9 as they are ultra critical :cheers:

duhfool · Nov 24, 2010

I'm attempting to do this today. So far, I had to also bend a bracket to get to the bolt and I had the luck to have the height adjustment on the seatbelt side fail, so I can't remove the seatbelt bolt.
My question is what are the torque settings for the seat bolts? When I took them out, they were definitely on super tight. I don't think it was the loctite that I was up against.

I'm probably going to try two other styles of fix.
1. use a torch to pull the cable while leaving the metal tip installer.
2. cut the middle of the sheathe, remove piece, then tape it together.

Barring that, I'm probably just going to leave the height adjustment unfixed, since getting to that one looks like it will be too painful.
It was the seat recline that was painful to live with.

Thanks for all the pioneers that provide me with all the DIY information. Saves me a lot of time.

jceg · Nov 24, 2010

duhfool said:
I'm attempting to do this today. So far, I had to also bend a bracket to get to the bolt and I had the luck to have the height adjustment on the seatbelt side fail, so I can't remove the seatbelt bolt.

TIS has the seat to floor plate bolt torque as 42nm.

Can you access the failed cable with the seat in the car? If so, pull the cable and use a power drill to spin it until you have enough clearance to take out the seatbelt bolt.

jceg · Nov 25, 2010

When I initially tried to fix my seat twist I attempted to do the whole job with the seat in the car. This went poorly due to the lack of clearance, light, and leverage. However, I did manage to get the cable out of its socket quite easily by using a butane stick lighter to heat up the cable socket. The flame on the lighter was very short, and I stuck a few layers of aluminum foil behind it to act as a heat shield. It worked fine. Just tossing it out as an option for the next time you take a look at it. I know how annoying the seat twist thing is, it happened on both of my seats within the last year.

peckbmw · Mar 31, 2011

Wow, what a life saver! Great DIY. I did the "Slice in the middle" technique. My first impression was the cable was like a speedo, rotating core, steel casing, rubber insulator. It was a little confusing on how to cut trough the casing. No worries tho, the casing is solid rubber!

My bad cable was the left side recline, unreachable with the seat in the car. Shoot, as i write this, i realize that to access the cable, I had to unhook some of the leather, and forgot to re-hook it, oh well, back to the seats.

Ken

m5rosemont83 · Mar 31, 2011

Was looking at this last night.. what a coincidence..
Will be doing both sides tonight! I got the car with my seats leeeeanin.. lol

Terabass · Mar 31, 2011

I will have a video DIY on this in couple days.

Kevin The Clean 1 · Mar 31, 2011

doc$holliday,

Thank you so much for this great DIY article. I have stumbled upon & read past this thread tons of times. I never really knew what it was about/referring to until tonight while I was vacuuming my car. I think my drivers seat has this same issue & now I need to fix it... !

djazz · Mar 31, 2011

My wife, Cindy, thanks you all for this thread.

m5rosemont83 · Apr 1, 2011

Great success..
just did this for both chairs.. recline and height as well
did it without removing the seatbelt or pin
just the 4 screws from the floor

agentZERO · Apr 2, 2011

in for the vids :biggrinbounce:

Kevin The Clean 1 · Jul 13, 2011

That would be great if someone created a video on this...

ehs · Apr 25, 2011

Thanks for a great DIY thread! I was able to fix the passenger seat recline (outer side was not moving) without removing the seat using the method of removing insulation in the middle of the cable and splicing the insulation with electrical tape. I was somewhat forced to go this route as it appeared that the seat anchor bolts are a Torx bigger than T-45 (the largest I had on hand). I read the OP advice that the bolts might be a 13mm, but on my car (2003), they are Torx. Don't know if that is what others found, but it might be good to add to the supplies list. If any other cable had required surgery, I would have had to do it once I had the right Torx bit.

Kevin The Clean 1 · Apr 26, 2011

My two front seats were each secured down with T-45 Torx bits too...

doc$holliday · Apr 26, 2011

Glad this thread is still doing a good job paying dividends to fellow members in need! A big thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to it as well. Waiting on the Terabass vids! lol.

Sean Paul

RideM5 · Jul 10, 2011

Can someone post a picture of under the seat with the motors labeled, identifying which seat part each cable is for(ie outside passenger recline, inside passenger rear vertical)? I unbolted my seat and took a look under and tried to feel the cables while operating the seat, but I'm still not confident which ones I should be cutting. Thanks

duhfool · Jul 12, 2011

You can look up your car and check the seat diagram on RealOEM.com Online BMW Parts Catalog.
That's what I did to check out which motor is what.

I still have to do the height repair, but since I don't use it, it wasn't a priority before I went on a road trip.

zaapa · Jul 10, 2011

Thanks for the great DIY - and I thought I was the only one with twisted seats!!!

The Complete DIY for Twisted Seat Repair!

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