Hey all. Did a search, but didn't find the answer. The leather front power bucket seats in my 91 GTA were torn, so I got some non-power cloth ones from a Firebird in the junkyard. I spent hours cleaning them up with a steam cleaner, stripping and painting the rails, and installing them. But, the drivers seat is tilted so far back, it's ghetto-like driving! (And I'm white, so I look stupid). Anyone have the same problem? Our cars already sit so low, I can barely see over the dash with the seat like this, and can't see the hood unless I bring the entire seat forward, then my legs are cramped. (Yeah, I'm cool, but I'd rather actually see where I'm going, than look like a gang member wannabe). The passenger side seat doesn't appear to be tilted this far back. So, I don't know if there's a bracket(s) that's bent that I may be able to bend back, if there's a simple lever I'm not seeing, if it needs lubricated to adjust the tilt forward, or what? By the way, I don't have a welder, so that's not an option.

- If it's not practical or safe to fix, (given the inertia mechanism that locks the seat upon impact), then I need to know if 4th gen seats have the same bolt pattern. Thanks!

 

Pull the drivers seat recliner from the original seat and install it on the cloth drivers seat. The easiest way to do this is to remove the seat from the car - remove the plastic trim - remove the 4 mounting botls from the seat recliner - installation is the reverse.

Many of the drivers seats I have come across seem to be reclined too far back. Sometimes when the hinge is exposed you can see that the mechanism is messed up and the seat just sits to WAYYYY to far back. Sometimes the mechanism appears OK and but the seat is still not comfortable.

If you were comfortable in your last drivers seat than just use that recliner.


Another option is to include a spacer ( like a washer ) in between the seat bottom and track when it's installed to slightly change the pitch of the seat. This will only make a minor adjustment to the seat position unless you use very thick spacers and longer than stock screws. If you wanted to stick some type of spacer under the seat track itself I would recomend that it be large enough to cover the whole "footprint" of the seat track and not something so small as a washer !

Your final option will be to install a power seat track. Then you could rasie the backrest high enough to be comfortable.

 

Ok there are a few things that can cause the sever lean. Unfortunatley none of them are good.

I've dealt with the same issue and ran into 2 of the main culprits.

1) the floor has become rotted and is sagging which lowers the two mounting studs at the rear of the seat. Usually this is easy to pinpoint by pulling up on the seat, and if the studs move at all then the floor has rotted out.

2) This isnt as bad as rotted out floors but not good either. Often the seats in our birds are used by heavy people that usually kinda plop themselves into the seat(I know cause I'm one of them), unfortunately this basically collapsed the framing inside the bottom cushion where the rails are bolted onto the seat, when I got my 83 TA, the seats were like that. The framing inside the bottom seat cushion isnt very beefy, just stamped stell that is shaped kinda like an "L" so with too much weight or a sudden jolt of weight the "L" kinda turns into a "C" or in really bad cases it smashs it in so far that the support metal doubles over. This can lower the back of the seat quite a bit.

I've had both the problems above, the first problem can be fixed by repairing or replacing the floor pan, or by at least welding in a plate of steel where the studs are so they dont sag. The second problem is a bit hard to repair since you would have to pull the bent stamped steel back out which will require heat to do it without breaking the steel. Unfortunately in order to use heat you would have to strip out all the seat material. only other way would be to use a crap load of washers between the seat frame and seat rails, and a longer bolt, and you could also put a few washers on the mounting studs in the floor to raise it a bit there too. The easiest fix for this is a new set of seats. I'm not sure if I have any pics of what I'm talking about, I will look, Im always taking pics of stuff like this so I may have them. I'll check and post them if I do.

 

did you pickup some 4way adjustable seats and not realize it yet? :P
is there an extra handle on the bottom? heh

just saying because if there was, one of those adjustments controls the angle of the entire seat assembly

 

if you had power seats before, you could install your new seats directly onto your old power tracks