Collapsed Driver seat change and position

[bobothegreat]

Hello all of you lovely people!
My poor belingo seat has given up the ghost and the driver seat has collapsed and ripped my work trousers in the process ? 

I have found a seat from a mk2 belringo multispace and plan on cutting the rails off my collapsed seat and weld them onto the new donor seat as the mk2 bolts onto the floor rather than the cill like the mk1.

Does anyone on here have any experience doing this? I'm going to investigate today and probably do the job tomorrow I'm aware there are welds to cut and dress before the transplant commences hopefully set the seat back further to give myself more legroom for my 6'4" body in the process too.

I shall document the process for others in future to hopefully help my berlingo brothers on the forum.

If anyone can help/guide/suggest anything it would be greatly appreciated ?

[Kieron G]

Yes I've fitted seats from M59 in my M49. Rears no problem. The front seats bolt ok on the inner side. As you say the outside edge on the M59 bolt into the floor and M49 into the inner sill. From memory I cut part of the outter edge away from the seat base at the front of the seat, threaded a long bolt front and back all the way into the inner sill with a spacer and locknut, temporarily packed the outter edge of the seat up to the correct height, sheeted everything up and in situ mig welded the protruding bolts to the seat base using spreader plates to transfer the load to where the bolt threads into the sill. This method worked for me but interested to see if you find a way of swapping the seat bases as the downside of my method is I can't take the front out now.

[bobothegreat]

Yeah it turned out to be interestingly fun to do, I basically cut the m59 base from the seat, cutting the 3 welds that attatch it, cleaned up the welds.
Then I cut the base off the m49 seat which was tricky as it is a 3door and the seats fold forward for passengers to get in so I cut the backrest of the seat off on the pivot point to free it from the base and had to dismantle the seat cushion to get to the seat springs to take them out to be left with the bare base frame.

As I found out for some reason the m59 seat is welded on top of the base lip and the m49 seat is welded under the base lip.

I cut the seat base frame away from the main base to get enough spread on the base to get the new seat in under the lip as the base is held together on the bottom by bracing/spacing bars, played with the position (managed to sit the seat about 50mm further back for more leg room) and mig welded the seat frame to the base. As I bumped the seat back the front made contact but had to bridge the gap at the back with weld.

The seat is easily bolted in as a m49 seat would be and taken out just as easy. Super happy with the result and a massive change from a collapsed seat.

[Kieron G]

Thanks for update on this. Especially useful to me with your Multispace being three door as I will need to tackle seats in our 'W' 1.8 petrol in the next few years and was wondering how I could keep it so front seats still drop forward. Just need to keep look out for good early M59 seats with no built in airbags

[bobothegreat]

It can definitely be done! Just depends how involved you want to get, personally it's my work van and never take passengers as I've taken the back seats out for more tool space and just needed to get it through MOT so didn't opt for the pivoting seat.

Anyway....

The back of the seat pivots on a pin on the base, you'd probably have to drill it out to free the mechanism from the base and probably replace it with a bolt or pin.
   


if you peel the backrest cover up you can see where the frame is welded to the mechanism, cut the welds with a grinder to free it up.
       

It would require you to cut the doner seat frame away from the old seat and weld the brackets back to the seat frame either take the cushions off or you could use a solder mat as I did to protect the seat while cutting and welding.

Hope you can make sense of it... if you're stuck I'm more than happy to do the process for you with the scrap seat and provide a walkthrough with pictures

[Kieron G]

Thanks Bob. Fortunately drivers seat still ok for now. Just thinking ahead as I know from experience how the early multispace drivers seat wears out and collapses. Still better than Dispatch, Just the drivers seat squab ( foam and material ) Is over £500 for mk1 from Citroen dealers.