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[feeutfo]

The wording moulded into the black box looks relevant to the particular plug, or is that too easy?  :-/

[mrjimbo]

Yeah thats right and as Kevin says it looks to relate to the movement of the seat and the memory side of things but where the heating side of things is appears to be somewhere other than that little box of tricks.

On that diagram i sent you K183 is the controller, but where does it live ? is it in the seat somewhere or is it buried in the bowels of the wiring loom, behind the dash perhaps ?

[Kevin Wood]

Seat heating connection goes into the seat on an 8 pin connector, long and thin, with 4 groups of 2 pins by the look of it.

Wire colours - Black and yellow, Black and blue and Brown.

Kevin

[mrjimbo]

At the bottom centre of the picture you can just see a round hole moulded into the seat foam with a wire going into it, at the bottom of the moulded hole is a connector with 2 Black/Blue wires to it but i cant manage to pull enough slack up to see whats below.

[Kevin Wood]

OK. That wire from the foam seems to go to a bunch of connectors on the left hand edge of the picture. Is one of those an 8 pin like I described? If so, I guess the controller is embedded in the seat.

Thanks for the help.

Kevin

[mrjimbo]

It goes across the base of the seat, under the outside runner and emerges behind the trim cover where the buttons for the memory and position are.

There looks to be a few more wires in there but i need to get the trim panel off and have a look tomorrow.

[feeutfo]

Much appreciated. 

[mrjimbo]

I'll get onto it later and see if i can trace the wiring a bit further and perhaps we can manage to sort a way of repairing them, i've got 4 front seats and a couple of rear bases here that need looking into 

[mrjimbo]

I've taken the side panel off but the cable doesn't come through to there, under closer inspection it looks like the cable goes to a Grey box buried in the seat foam, the same as the ones on the rear base but where the wiring goes to from there i have no idea at the moment.





I now need to raise the seat away from the runners so i can get a better view and access but as the seat is out of the car i have no way of powering it up and i can't find any manual winders. Is there any way of powering upthe seat motors easily without putting the seat back into the car ?

[I_want_an_Omega]

Some thoughts having repaired many seats whilst between jobs last year.

You can just pop the seat into the car, connect it up to raise it without having to do the bolts up again as it is impossible to remove the screws without the seat being fully up.

The grey box is actually a relay which is cunningly wired so as to allow a separate thermostat unit to be used. Be warned however that with the seat element O/C you will still get current flow via the relay coil making it look as it the element is working whereas it isn't really. When you put it all back again you MUST put the thermostat probe exactly where it came from. If not then the on/off temp will change and it it goes outside a comfortable range you will end up with a burnt b*m! The cloth seat elements have a built-in thermostat.

Unless there is a simple break then these are difficult to mend. In the past I've laid cloth elements under the leather covers. Even if there is a break it often then fails somewhere else a few days/weeks later.

The basic problem is that the leather seats use a very very very fine multi-strand resistance wire with dozens & dozens of conductors. Over time some of these fail putting greater emphasis on the remaining ones - which is why one of the failure modes is a very low heat as only a few strands are still conducting. The cloth seats have a single & much bigger conductor - its more liable to physical damage - like someone kneeling and then just stop working. The pads were available from Vx but are no longer available. In the past I've stripped down perfectly working cloth seats just to salvage the pads. When available the pads were about £50 each?

MV6 leather dosn't have sewn/stranded elements, they use the same pads as the cloth seats - much easier to work with. So the good news for leather MV6 owners is but cloth seats for spare parts.

Elite cloth seats are built in the same way as the leather seats - so if you are looking for donor seats then restrict yourself to GLS/CD/CDX cloth.

The current draw is about 5.5 amps and the seats have a resistance of just over 2 ohms per seat - this means that each base or back has a resistance of just over 1 ohm each.

Another trick is to use small cable ties instead if hog-rings when re-building the seat, Much easier to work with IMHO.

HTH

[mrjimbo]

I won't be able to do much on the seat now for a few days as my holiday is finished and i'm back at work, but next rest day (Monday) i'll pop it back in the car and raise the seat fromthe runners and strip it further, should find out a bit more with less stuff in the way   

[Boditza]

i'll be w8ing for sure.. my driver seat doesn't work (, and with this cold weather its a pain in the [smiley=lipsrsealed.gif].

[I_want_an_Omega]

If you want to join a broken stranded heated element then just look for the burnt bit as a starter.

Then you will need a very sharp blade to cut into the foam to locate both ends, once you have the ends then clean them and splice in a short length of cable.

As I said before, the chances are that the fault will appear somewhere else before too long.

Good luck

[mrjimbo]

Whats best for that ?  Copper core wire or steel ?

I take it you remove the insulation as well

[I_want_an_Omega]

The heating wire is very thin multi-stranded bare wire. It can be soldered to after you have cleaned the burnt end bits off. So, just use some copper wire of the correct size and all will be ok. I always use insulated copper wire for the repairs as you need a little extra length to play with and I'd rather not have too much bare wire inside the seat.

The stranded wire uses the foam of the seat pads as it's insulation.

HTH - Rob