zekgb

I have an early 85 and it seems that the control switch has failed and the seat moved itself all the way forward and won't go back. I do not see a manual seat release lever as referred to here:



Am I missing something obvious?

Landseer

On 84 its a short lever that is fairly difficult to reach when seated.

Best way to reach is kneel outside car, reach under the front of seat with your left hand, somewhat left of the center line, and reach back pretty far. Its a round solid rod. I think it pulls toward you. You have to move the lever a lot in order to disengage it. There is sharp stuff in there so you might get your hand scratched. Am not certain, but think the 85 will be same as 84.

Mike Frye

The electric 8 way seats in my car have a hole in the front of the plastic cover with a 6 mm allen head bolt that you can turn to move the seat forward and back manually. Take it S-L-O-W though. I'm the process of reupholstering mine right now and I used a cordless drill to move things along. After a few revolutions the plastic teeth on the gear wheel started snapping off.

What happens is that after 20 years the grease has turned to paste and it's just gumming up the tracks (just like what happens with the electric sunroof). If you take out the seat, you might want to refresh this grease by first cleaning all the old stuff out instead of just putting new stuff on top of it.

Good luck!

BTW- I don't think that's the pic for the '85. Mine has gears and motors and wires and stuff.

BrianG

Those pics look like the underside of the 2-way power Sport-seats in my '86.5 car. There was only power lift of the seat-pan, fore and aft. All other functions were manual.

JHowell37

On the '85 and later models there is a allen head bolt like Mike said. Heed his warnings about taking it easy turning the bolt. Those plastic gears fall apart easily.

Changing the switch can be kind of a pain in the *** and the switch is a bit pricey. If you're not afraid to do a little soldering you can use the switch for the memory seats and save a lot of money. The switches for memory and non-memory are the same with one slight difference. On the memory seat switch one of the terminals (ground IIRC) is not used since the since the wiring runs through that computer on cars with memory seats. If you attach a wire to that ground, and hook things up properly the switch works fine.

marton

if you do have the seat release lever then it looks a bit like the stiff wire used to make coat hangers.

Marton