Personal Notes

A Sliding Seat

Mark Furneaux - webmaster

When I first go my Singer 4AD I was a little puzzled why the drivers seat seemed to slide at will. The catch didn't catch at all. So I decided to investigate by removing the drivers seat.

That's a simple matter; remove the rear sear cushion and slide the front see as far back as it will go till it comes off the runners. This reveals the locking mechanism on the bottom of the seat that should fit, at pre-determined steps into square holes in the runner to lock the movement. Problem - the locking mechanism was on one side, the runner with the holes on the other.

At first the solution seemed easy; simply undo the runners and swap them over. On my car that was surprisingly easy to do - no rusted nuts or anything.

Final step, refit the seat. But no matter how hard I tried I could not get the seat to go back far enough to engage the start of the runners - the seat back always got in the way. I have no idea what changed when the runners were changed over but something did - swap the runners back and the seat slid back on no problem. May be that's why the runners were the wrong way round in the first place.

The solution turned out to be to remove the backrest from the seat base by undoing the nut and bolt on either side. The seat, minus the back slid on without a problem; it locked in position as it should, and then I refitted the back.