Seat swap

S

Speed Demon

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Yes I did search, no help. I found some seats from a Thunderbird SC, I always liked the side bolsters to help hold you in the corners.:D Would these fit in the Mark? What about making the fold down rear seat work from the same? Maybe I'll be the first, hope not. Lets see what you guys know...
 
pretty sure the fold down seat will work but of course you have to cut out the bracing back there.
 
Yes they will work. You will have to do some re-wiring cause the connectors are all different, but they will physically bolt-in. If I ever found a set of grey leather SC seats in immaculate shape for a decent price, I would do the same thing. My gen2 seats are pretty nice, but I honestly think the SC seat is the best factory seat I have ever sat in in any car. It's very supportive, and still perfectly comfortable for a 10hr drive. As for the rear fold-down, as was said you will have to cut out the bracing, but other than that it should work.
 
If you have a gen 1, just get gen 2 seats. Guys correct me if im wrong but I believe the foam and covers can be swapped so you dont have to do any wiring. Bigger bolsters, and they actually match the interior. Tbird SC seats doint last half as long as mark viii seats, and they look horrible. But thats just my opinion.
 
I don't care what people think about the way the SC seats look, they hold you in like you wouldn't believe during cornering. Makes the 2nd gen seats feel like a bench seat in a truck. When my leather goes bad I will be doing SC seats.

1st and 2nd gen SHOs have similar seats, but I don't know if they would have the same seat rails or not.
 
You can swap the gen 1 and gen 2 seat foams.....

I'm not a real fan of the Thunderbird seat, SC or not.
 
I had the anni. ed SC, black leather with grey suede. Yeah I know about the bracing. Since the tbird doesn't have this I assume its not needed? The ones I found are black leather. Other than extra ribbing down the center there is no emblems so they would match pretty good. The second gens don't have side air bolsters do they? The wiring might suck. Hmmmm.:shifty: Maybe the I could wrap my skins over the birds and add have upolstery shop cut/sew sides? I'm so confused:confused: . Time for more research.
 
The wiring won't be bad. Just get a wiring diagram for each car, and make sure you are sending power and ground to the right places, and the rest of it is all already built into the switches, which are already in the seat so you don't need to mess with it at all. It would definitely take less time to do the wiring than to try to re-skin your frames with the SC parts, and there's no guarantee doing that would work. For the bracing, if you get rid of it, I would definitely at least install either the L-braces out of a SC, or a rear strut tower brace. I don't know if the L-braces will bolt in place on the mark or not. Without that brace, all that load gets transferred to the rear window. Also, while that brace is fine on my lincoln, I have broken it on every MN12 I've ever owned from carving up corners, so it definitely does bear some load. As for the side bolsters, no the 2nd gen marks don't have adjustable bolsters like the SCs did. They do have some bolster built into them, and they are a vast improvement over the 1st gen mark seats, but they don't compare to the SC seat at all for support, and in my opinion, good condition SC seats are just as comfortable as the 2nd gen mark seats are.
 
we threw a mark rear seat in the "thundermark" (95 bird) and it fit, it did fit a lil different but it worked, the bottom was short or something? not really noticeable but it wasn't perfect. im curious about re skinning the mark frames in sc covers, i need to take a good look at the seat frames side by side but i bet i can do it as long as there close enough
 
chickenviii said:
we threw a mark rear seat in the "thundermark" (95 bird) and it fit, it did fit a lil different but it worked, the bottom was short or something? not really noticeable but it wasn't perfect. im curious about re skinning the mark frames in sc covers, i need to take a good look at the seat frames side by side but i bet i can do it as long as there close enough
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Why would you want to though? That seems like an awful lot of work for no reason, since we already know that either seat will bolt into either platform, and all you are left dealing with is a few wires.
 
actually re skinning a seat aint that bad, i got a "little" experience and i aint scared, i can do almost any seat in about a hour, then once you get the sequence down it gets easy, ive done entire car re skins in a couple hours.
also not sure how the memory seat would deal with everything else, so a re skin would retain all factory adjustments, as far as the car knows its stock.
 
The SC seats only need one power and one ground, and the rest is split off internally. I'd rather just spend 10 minutes soldering connectors on and be done with it, but to each his own. I'll have to look up how the memory seat is done. If it is a separate module, then it wouldn't be any problem, but if it is done within the seat, then you would probably have a decent amount of wiring to do. Also for the memory seat, I don't know if it would throw it off not having the power seatback, since all the SC seats have a manual seatback. Also, if you tried to put the SC skins on the mark frames, I'm sure you would have issues with the bolsters as you would have to swap the bladders over, and you would probably have to cut and weld the seat frame to clear them. The other option might be using the complete SC seatback, but keeping the bottom portion of the mark seat frame, and bolting the SC seat bottom to the mark frame and motors. Again, the only problem with this would be the SC seatback being manual and the mark expecting to see a power-adjustable seatback. Of course, I'm the kind of guy who never should have bought a lincoln in the first place because I hate things like power seatbacks and memory seats, so I welcome the opportunity to get rid of all that, splice 2 wires together, and have some comfortable and more supportive seats.
 
I pulled apart a second gen seat in 15 min... the first one took an hour.... It really isn't bad at all.
 
SC seats are more supportive, and they are still comfortable for long drives, unlike the corbeau seats, which will make you hate your life after more than 30 minutes.
 
You're probably going to lose your preset feature with the wiring. I would see if you could keep the Mark VIII frame and put the SC seat on it.
 
That would be easier to do on a Gen2 than Gen1... the Gen2 seat track neatly unbolts from the rest of the seat, the Gen1 the seat track doesn't unbolt nicely.
 
kustomizingkid said:
That would be easier to do on a Gen2 than Gen1... the Gen2 seat track neatly unbolts from the rest of the seat, the Gen1 the seat track doesn't unbolt nicely.
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lol i stripped a gen 1 seat and was like wtf? talk about a mess of crap!
ive also thought about modifying the foam a lil in mine too, just lower the centers a lil
 
The Thunderbird SC seats are pretty awesome! I would swap them out in a second!
 
chickenviii said:
lol i stripped a gen 1 seat and was like wtf? talk about a mess of crap!
ive also thought about modifying the foam a lil in mine too, just lower the centers a lil
Click to expand...


Exactly!

I pulled the two gen 2 seats apart, no problem... easy...

Then I did an gen 1 seat and all I could think is WTF!!!!
 
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