The frustration of rotation

 Day 51: Swivel seat installed on passenger side.  Our design plans do not allow enough room on the driver side to swivel.  This should have been a simple 1 to 2 hours install.  Three days later it finally yielded to my unwavering persistence and swearing.  But it was worth all the blood sweat and tears.

Always read warnings and instructions before beginning any installation.  In this case be very careful to Wichtiger your Bedienhinweis or else your Werden will die in verbindung!

Installation seems pretty simple all I have to do is assemble the Fahrerseite to the Beifahrerseite.

Problem #1, The holes in the adapter do not line up with holes in the Seat stand.  A few hours of grinding and test fitting later all the bolts can slip effortlessly into place.

Problem #2: That stinking little handle looking thing is blocking my Fahrerseite from swiveling!  A quick check in the Ford Transit forum explains that this little wire is designed by top tier Ford engineers to be completely useless.  So, where is my Sawzall?

Problem solved!  I wonder how often a hammer or saw is the answer to life’s problems?  

Just a touch of Rust-oleum to prevent, well, rust.  My boss didn’t approve of blue paint against the black frame so she repainted it later.

Next problem: the seat securing bolts are too long and again defeat my swiveling plans.  Can’t remember if I replaced the bolts or solved this problem with the hacksaw.  I’m betting hacksaw.

Next problem:  This big honking electrical connector!  It is the size of a toaster oven.  What possible reason would anyone source a connector this big.  Why is that a problem?

It has to fit through the small hole in the middle of the swivel base adaptor.  Of course, it does not fit.  My two options are:

1.     remove the connector, feed the cable thru the hole and reattach the connector on the other side.

2.     Sawzall and hammer the stupid thing through the hole.

I don’t own a set of pin release keys that would make this job take less than a minute.  So I have a small piece of metal I bent into an approximation of a release key and went fishing for the release pins.  Each individual wire took between 2 and 20 minutes to find the stinking little pin to release it.  To facilitate reassembly and prevent electrical fires I carefully labeled each wire.

Reassembly on the other side of the swivel adaptor was a like a 5-minute job.  Now all that remains it to attach the chair to the swivel base and give her a whirl.

Success!  It swivels but with some issues.  Ford did not plan enough space for this chair to swivel.  To make the seat swivel it must be adjusted to center of the of the base, the seat back must be in the upright and locked position, the passenger door must be open and the seat belt has to be positioned above the arm.

An additional issue is that stupid toaster oven plug and its wire is so big it interferes with the front to back seat adjustment.  As a result, we lost about half of the travel.  So, if you have really long legs things are going to be a bit tight.

 And it was just that easy!