BigBlue

iTrader: (4)

I had to dig into the bottom of the stock pass. seat of my '07 Z. Wasn't fun and kind of a hassle, but I wanted to at least try to be able to hook the sensor up again installed in the new seat. Here is basically what I did and some explaination of what some of you guys may have to deal with if installing race style seats. My advise is to get the seat rested up off the ground, sit down and get comfortable.

You have to remove these 4 12 mm bolts; in all 4 corners under the seat then I wrestled it all loose and it basically seperated from the back of seat; you need that access for what's to come:





I got pliers to remove about 20 of these metal rings that hold seat cover material to seat, plus some others. You need to pull the cover material down anway.


Also, follow the harness wire and you can see where it goes into the foam seat pad. The larger plastic covered one goes up to side airbag. *Here is the location of the sensor, just getting into the fun part!



Here it is! Open the pad up and with pliers remove the metal rings that are anchoring the sensor down; the "tabs" that surround the sensor are anchored down by these; rip 'em out by the roots!



It's alive!



There it is. I was hoping that I would just be able to reach in between the foam pads and work it out, but NO; must remove more of those metal rings so open it up and get the thing out. Bigger unit than I had expected no doubt, ugly too!



Luckily my new seat allows for mid section to pull up; I just cut out a piece of heavy cardboard as a base to lay the sensor on; fished the plug down underneath, plugged it in. *On the stock seat I re-used several of the metal rings and pulled it together well and put back together; looks normal! I may try to sell them.
*At this point I hope this procedure is going to work out with the new seat, at least it's installed and plugged in; I had to get the sensor out bottom line and hopefully this post may shed some light as to what you may be looking at if doing it yourself. Also, the airbag sensor "resistor trick" has worked just fine so far.

mwcarroll

Nice write-up! Definitely looks like I'll just be doing the resistor mod and not this. Just installed a set of Sparco Pro 2000's last night.

dkmura

iTrader: (64)

The only problem with installing these in a race seat is that the seating position has been altered. Nissan designed the airbags to deploy at a certain angle for the passenger and if that changes significantly, injury or worse could be the result. Best to hope these never get deployed under any circumstances.

BigBlue

iTrader: (4)

Good point and hopefully there will never be any safety issues to any of us, that includes the thousands of people out there who are swapping out seats in many brands/models of cars. This seat market is huge and these issues are going to be there regardless. I've had 3 street bikes before (honda, triumph, kawasaki) and nowadays I realize that I was lucky to have survived my bike years! So I'm not so worried about whatever angle my airbags may deploy, because in a bad wreck, well......

BigBlue

iTrader: (4)

The re-installed weight sensor in new pass. seat is working well! Did a lot of driving over the weekend sitting in both seats; my Son driving plenty (young hot rodder!) and NO red light at all! So far the airbag resistor routine and re-install of weight sensor has been a success, hopefully it stays like that! *lucky for me that it was easy to install into new seat, sucked getting it out.