Harvesting Seat Track Feet for Alternate Seats

[DPDISXR4Ti]

Installing after-market or junkyard donor seats from another vehicle can be a challenge in the XR or Scorpio since the tracks don't mount in a simple, flat manner. And so the easiest way to address this is using the feet from factory original seats, harvesting the seat tracks from seats otherwise on their way to the dumpster. I've done this before using just the 4 feet, drilling out the rivets from each foot. It occurred to me today that harvesting each of the two rails with the two feet attached might be a better way.

Step 1 is cutting the plate on each side where it attaches to the worm gear...

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Close-up of one side for clarity...

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Here's where it gets a little difficult to describe, but basically you need to get physical and using a long punch of some sort, ideally about a 1/2" in diameter and 24" long, you need to smash the plastic roller stoppers out the other end. I didn't have anything that long at hand, so I improvised.

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Here's a close-up of the things you're looking to kill...

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Here's what was left. I harvested the motors before pitching. Just two 7mm hex-head screws hold them in place.

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Here's the final harvest...

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These were Scorpio motorized seats which are probably a little more difficult to dismantle. You can use Scorpio feet on a XR but not vice-versa. The weird thing is that 7 of the 8 feet pictured here are riveted to the rails. One of the rear feet, on only one side, is bolted to the rail. If you look close you can see it. The bolt heads restricted the access to knock out the roller stoppers. In hindsight, maybe I should have tried to knock them out front to back rather than the back to front approach I took with all of them.

[milehighXR]

It's easier if you can Scorpio seat tracks that are already puking rollers

It's already happening with the early Scorpio seat bottoms in my XR...

[andyofcolumbusmerkur]

Did you use these on some seats? I have a set of black manual adjust bmw seats from a 318ti I was going to mess with. I think they would look at home in an XR.

[DPDISXR4Ti]

Did you use these on some seats? I have a set of black manual adjust bmw seats from a 318ti I was going to mess with. I think they would look at home in an XR.

I did, but in a slightly different way. I used only the 4 feet which I had individually removed from the original rails and adapted those to the tracks removed from the Alfa Romeo Milano with Recaro seats. With what you see "harvested" here, I've got the right and left side feet still attached to the original tracks, removed from the slider/height assembly. I would start there and if that doesn't work out, then remove the feet and use all four of them independently.

The bottom line message is to try to use as much as possible of the original track assembly from the donor seat. Trying to use the slider/height adjustment assembly from original Merkur seats almost always sets them too high in the car.

[my8950]

Interesting, I've got a pile of original XR seat tracks that I've been itching to just toss, but I feel bad doing so, therefore they just sit in the middle of the floor/walkway. Maybe if I could find some other seats to swap I'd give it a shot.

[DPDISXR4Ti]

Interesting, I've got a pile of original XR seat tracks that I've been itching to just toss, but I feel bad doing so, therefore they just sit in the middle of the floor/walkway. Maybe if I could find some other seats to swap I'd give it a shot.

At least if you pare them down to the useable portions the pile will be a little smaller. Of course that takes time, so you have to decide if time is more valuable or space.

[DPDISXR4Ti]

Thought it was worth adding this pic to this thread. This is for a Scorpio, but it's nearly the same for an XR. This shows the stripped-down harvested seat rails (passenger side) with mounting feet installed in parts car for mock-up. I've done this before in the XR with just the feet, but this should be a little easier to work with since the front/back spacing is already set. The annoying part is that the inner rail (bottom of pic) has a tracking-rail still welded to it which is about 1/4" higher than the main rail surface. It's not needed, so I could cut it off, but it's pretty thick and would take some effort to remove. For now, I've decided it will be easier to machine a spacer taking that into account.

As a reference in this thread, here's the project on fitting the Volvo S60 seats into a Scorpio.
https://forum.merkurclub.com/forum/view ... hp?t=43376

About the widest (side-to-side) your new seat rails can be is 19" (O.D.). I'm right at that limit with the Volvo seat tracks.

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