[Guide] How to put a volvo s60 seat into a prius

Just finished this job, too much speculations not enough wisdom on this job. Im not posting pictures because they will eventually be lost in the interwebs over the next 8 years, so I will try my best to explain via text. Enjoy

Heres how to do it:

1) Aquire a Volvo S60 Front drivers seat, and an extra Prius front seat with airbag (if you have side airbags) from junk yard.

2) If your Volvo Seat is electric, wire up the motors to the switches directly to bypass the computer and relays. The switches are dpdt which means they close the circuit one way to a motor to activate it, and then close it the opposite way (in terms of polarity) to reverse direction of the motors. I also added a kill switch to the whole unit, so I feel safer blah blah. The motors are easy to locate underneath the seat. There were four in mine. The motors/switches were powered using a 12v cigarette lighter outlet, and male attachement (sell these at walmart for cheap, best bet now that radioshack is gone) with a 5amp fuse, so this is extra safe people.

After the electronics for the power seats are all set,

3) Disassemble extra prius seat and extract the two rails.
4) Grind the rails in half so you are left with merely the feet that bolt into the car, and a stripd of thin metal connecting them. You should have two peices total, with each peice having TWO feet for bolting. These feet are connected vertically by a thin sheet of metal, essentially the bottom half of the rail. This will help you line up the feet in the correct positions so you cant screw it up as easily.

5) Grind Off volvo seat feet and make room to weld (weldings not hard dont worry) prius feet + bottom rail to the bottom of teh volvo rails. GRIND OFF ALL BLACK PAINT WITH FLAP DISK. easy to do, not expensive.

6) Measure the distance between feet in your prius. Mine were around 15.5 - 16 in, but it varies. do the work, measure twice, weld once.

7) Clamp up the two prius feet strips (remeber that the bottom part of the rail is still attached to teh prius feet) and make sure everything is clean and measured.

8) go rent a welder from home deopt. cost 40 bucks for 4 hours here in ct. worked great, dont use a crappy welder for this.

9) weld the feet/strips to the volvo rails. practice practice practice beforehand. You need to get good deep welds at least near the feet areas.

10) clean, paint over welds with black paint.

11) transfer prius seatbelt over to volvo, along with position sensor, and wire harness. this is easy, plug and play fits right wehere the volvo seat belt was.

12) put seat into car. i suggest doing it from the trunk tbh. disscnonect 12v battery and WAIT 90 SEC BEFOR REMOVING YOUR PRIUS SEAT. then youll be fine.

13) connect the all the sensors into their proper place and just let the position sensor (remove from prius junk seat) lie on the ground. If it is not near metal, it is in reclined mode, which is what you want because I assume your a person around 6ft or more. You can just attach a switch to manually change the positoin in the computer, but eehhh. not for me. Im the only driver.

14) For the airbag I used a 5ohm resistor. Worked great, I pulled it off a random circuit board lying around. the resistance is finicky, as it only worked using aligator clips to connect it, as soldering it directly to the sensor wires wouldnt work. (take the yellow airbag female port from your junk seat, and clip it off to use for this purpose. This way you can disconnect itm and put your prius seat back in if needed)

and thats about it. hope this helps some people, and no im not correcting any grammar.

 

pics here

 

lumbar support too! its a dream. my back is already reverse aging

 

yea but I cared when I tried to find the old threads of people doing this, 8 years later, only to find teh pictures were useless, or gone.