Limited seat swap from 4th gen fail - side airbag deployed

[JohnOfTheJungle]

The leather seats in my 97 limited are real torn up. Ive been reading about seat swaps here and there, Ive heard of Land Rover seats, Camry seats, all sorts of stuff, and assumed the 4th gen seats would be fairly easy to swap.

So I found a pair at a local junkyard for $60 and figured I’d give it a try.

I took my passenger seat out, dropped the 4th gen in to check fitment. It’s not great, there is a raised part of the body of my 3rd gen with a fan and that interferes with the motors on the 4th gen seat. But rails are about same width.

There are 3 plugs on the bottom of the 4th gen seats vs just 1 for my 3rd gen (power).
I knew there were side airbags in 4th gen, but figured I could just bypass all those plugs and hook power up and roll like that.

Well, when I did that and hooked up the battery positive the airbag immediately blew and busted up the plastic on the inside of my pillar. So needless to say I’m a little disappointed, and I guess I was naive in thinking I could just hook them straight up. Also now I’m scared of side airbags, haha.

If I was going to do it again I think I would try to clip the power to the airbag altogether. However, even if I got that to work, I’d still have a bit of a challenge getting the passenger seat to work.

Does anyone have knowledge on how that could have been avoided?




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[sleepydad]

[MENTION=164146]JohnOfTheJungle[/MENTION]

I want to thank you for posting a fail. Seriously I’m the kind of guy who just tries stuff and I have made some epic blunders. I hope to keep making those blunders as long as I am able.

One thing that bugs me about the online deal is everybody is trying to make their life seem interesting. They only post the success. Guess what I’m not that success, I’m a normal joe blow average dude who always drops that bolt right into the pan of oil I just filled up. I drop that same bolt again and it rolls to the gemetric center of the most inaccessible place in the room.

 

[bigtooona]

I have nothing to contribute, but your post made me laugh, I could see myself doing something similar. Glad nobody was nearby when it blew, but good luck with the swap!

 

[JohnOfTheJungle]

Haha no problem, happy to contribute and boost some spirits.

I didn’t even write about the 2 inch gash I put in the paint on my rear passenger door when I was swinging the seat in and out and the mounting foot gouged. That one felt real good.


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[marcus clarkus]

whoa thanks for the heads up! I've been meaning to check out some junkyards for power seats.

3rd gens never were offered with side airbags, right?

 

[JohnMc]

+1 on being brave enough to post up a fail.

It's certainly an issue, strolling through junkyards eyeballing nice looking seats, more and more of them now have those SRS tags sewn into them.

In this case - did the existing 3rd gen plug just happen to fit one of the 4th gen plugs that lead to the airbag? So instead of powering the seat motors, it just set the bag off?

 

[LookAtThatDog]

That's hilarious. I'm also kind of surprised you got the seats and airbags for that cheap - aren't airbags expensive? Did it blow up in a way that you think would have any safety benefit? Like if you somehow wired it up to the 3rd gen airbag system, do you think it would be beneficial in a crash? Or just beat you up more?

 

[Scramble]

[MENTION=164146]JohnOfTheJungle[/MENTION]

I want to thank you for posting a fail. Seriously I’m the kind of guy who just tries stuff and I have made some epic blunders. I hope to keep making those blunders as long as I am able.

One thing that bugs me about the online deal is everybody is trying to make their life seem interesting. They only post the success. Guess what I’m not that success, I’m a normal joe blow average dude who always drops that bolt right into the pan of oil I just filled up. I drop that same bolt again and it rolls to the gemetric center of the most inaccessible place in the room.

LOL, I couldn't tell you how many times I've dropped the oil pug into the catch pan! LOL

 

[SilverRidgeRunner1]

I wonder if u couldn't just have that repaired I mean it doen't seem out of the question

 

[muellernautique]

I didn’t even write about the 2 inch gash I put in the paint on my rear passenger door when I was swinging the seat in and out and the mounting foot gouged. That one felt real good.

ouch, did the exact same thing installing seats a while back. always fun to look at the scratch a couple of weeks later and remember all the crap you went through trying to do whatever it was.

 

[2ndhandyotaman]

Could you remove the blown airbag and close up the velcro flap so that you could re-use the Camry seat? I was recently looking at some Camry seats ( from an '08) as a candidate for a swap into my '99. I just happened to stumble across a perfect condition Limited passenger seat that I swapped everything over to my drivers frame to but some time. While it looks nice, these stock seats kill my back.

 

[nissanh]

Good that you didn't install both with the battery terminal off. Otherwise both will deploy upon connecting the battery terminal!

 

[JohnOfTheJungle]

+1 on being brave enough to post up a fail.

It's certainly an issue, strolling through junkyards eyeballing nice looking seats, more and more of them now have those SRS tags sewn into them.

In this case - did the existing 3rd gen plug just happen to fit one of the 4th gen plugs that lead to the airbag? So instead of powering the seat motors, it just set the bag off?

Yea so...I was reading more last night on the 4th gen forum trying to figure out what went wrong.

Your hunch is correct, I cut the plug off the yellow wires from the 4th gen seat and also clipped off the plug from the lead of my 3rd gen 4runnner, twisted them up and gave them a quick wrap of tape. Then hooked the battery up and BOOM!

Turns out I basically did the exact thing that would blow the airbag - didn’t even hook the damn seat up and just hotwired the airbag.

The reason I assumed the yellow plug was the one is because it just had two wires. The other two plugs had 6-8 wires each. I really should have looked through more wiring diagrams.

All that said it probably wouldn’t be a big deal to cut the airbag out and stitch up the seat. I still would need to figure out the feet (a couple of them need to be lengthened). The driver seat is still fine,

I also read about comfort of the seats - a lot of people whine about them on the 4th gen forums. Maybe they wouldn’t be an upgrade at all. Or maybe I’m just trying to talk my way out of doing the work, haha.


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[csp]

A wiring diagram of the seat wires would have kept you from connecting the wrong wires.

 

[JohnOfTheJungle]

A wiring diagram of the seat wires would have kept you from connecting the wrong wires.

You got that right!


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[Tyler James Inc]

So, there really isn't any issue using 4th gen seats- just don't hotwire the airbag circuit [emoji23]

Sorry to see that happen. At least now you know what the SRS connectors look like!
They typically also have a more secure latching mechanism than the other connectors on the vehicle [emoji1360]


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[neverenough]

I used a couple seats with blown bags. I just cut out the bags and had an upholstery shop sew up the seats for 20$ each

 

[JohnOfTheJungle]

I used a couple seats with blown bags. I just cut out the bags and had an upholstery shop sew up the seats for 20$ each

Were they 4th gen seats? If so, how'd you go about adapting the mounts?

 

[JohnMc]

Were they 4th gen seats? If so, how'd you go about adapting the mounts?

We put some Mazda seats in my wife's '96.

1) Cut the legs off of the 3rd gen seats.
2) Make small rails out of 1" square steel tubing
3) Weld the feet to the rails
4) Cut the feet off the Mazda seats
5) Bolt the Mazda seat sliders to the 1" square tubing rails

Fairly easy. In that case the width of the seat rails matched the Toyota seats, so we didn't even need cross bars on the rails. If they were different, we'd have needed to weld some cross tubes in (to make a complete square instead of two separate rails).

The 1" rails raised the seat up, but that was what she wanted anyhow.