Ahhhh.....

First things first: It's "Ebony." The car's name is Ebony. First suggested by Sydne Fredrickson, and later by Matt Sware (although he suggested the German version, Ebenholz), this name appears to have stuck. Here's a recent beauty shot, taken in front of John and Dee Zimmerman's house. Look how the early morning light plays over the complex surfaces of the body:

That means we're a two-Z4 family now. Regular readers will remember the For Sale ad I recently created for Merlot, the 2.5i Roadster. By the time I finished that post detailing the car, I was already thinking, "Why in the world am I selling this car?" But I had offered it to a friend who was seriously interested, so I let that process move forward, all the while hoping he wouldn't buy it. After much consideration, he decided to pass, and I immediately took it off the market, marking it SOLD and deleting the contact info in the ad. Merlot is mine! And so is Ebony!

Now on to the topic of this post: seats. The one thing I haven't liked about Ebony has been the sport seats. Don't get me wrong, they are great seats - I just don't fit into them. They are sized for 29-year-old "Euro-butts" with 30-inch waists. I had a 30-inch waist when I was in my 20's, but that's a really long time ago. I've also had back surgery, and the bolsters on those sport seats pressed on my hips at exactly the right spot to flare up the old sciatica. These photos of the bolsters show how aggressive they are - the second shot is from the top, looking down the seat back:

I tried a few experiments with cushions, and also talked with an auto upholstery shop out in Manheim, but I didn't really want to change the sport seats. It also didn't help that Merlot has the standard, non-sport seats, and I find them very comfortable. I set out to find a set of standard seats for Ebony. I knew that the Dream Red leather would be tough to find, so I was willing to consider black seats also. My plan was to keep the sport seats, return them to the car when I sell it, and sell the standard seats separately.

Amazingly enough, I found a set of Dream Red seats at a reasonable price, the only problem being that they were in North Carolina. That's when John and Dee did me a HUGE favor! John said, "We've been wanting to get away for a few days - we'll go pick them up for you." And that's exactly what they did! The seats were owned by a medical doctor that had replaced them with sport seats in his Z4 Roadster. He fits in the sport seats because he's young - his wife delivered their third child just days before John and Dee arrived.

Today I installed the new seats, and they work great. Eight-way power seats, just like the seats that came out. I'm not going to track or autocross this car, but we do have an extensive driving vacation planned for it this summer, so having some "touring" seats makes a lot of sense. And it made me feel better when Matt Sware told me that Jay Leno did the very same thing in one of his recent cars! 

Once in the car, the standard seats look like they belong there:

Installing the seats was not totally easy, because I needed to swap the seat belt latches from the sport seats to the standard ones. Apparently, this is always the case - I didn't find a single set of seats on the Internet that came with the latches. Those are high-demand items for cars being repaired after a collision, because they have an explosive tensioner that blows in even a minor wreck. Salvage yards remove them before selling used seats.

The rest of the post is some detail about how to do it, just to remind me when I swap the seats back. 

SWAPPING BMW SEATS AND SEATBELT LATCHES/TENSIONERS

1. Move the seat all the way back to reach the 16 mm nuts at the front of the frame. They are under rubber caps that just pop off.

2. Move the seat all the way forward to reach the 16 mm bolts at the back of the frame.

3. Raise the seat most of the way, and use a 16 mm box-end wrench to detach the seat belt at the seat frame. Then lower the seat all of the way, to make it easier to get out.

4. The seatbelt passes through a guide on the seat. On the sport seats, the outer part pops open by pushing it back at the top, pushing from the front side of the seat:

On the standard seats, you have to remove a Torx-head screw at the top of the guide, and then the outer bar drops off.

5. Tilt the seat back so you can work underneath, and unhook the electrical cable from the seat. There's a latch that requires a small screwdriver or pry bar to open. The first picture shows it closed, and the second open:

6. Remove the seat from the car, and put it on the bench. The yellow housing needs to move to the other seat. It just slides out after squeezing the little tabs on the front:

7. Once it's out, you have to remove the black cover over the plugs. First, cut off the small wire tie. Then, gently bend down the black tabs on either side (just visible at the bottom of the photo above), and then slide the cover off:

Now is also a great time to take a picture of the plugs in the yellow housing, so you can get it back together right later. This is the driver's side - the passenger side has another plug for the occupancy sensor:

8. At this point, note which plugs are attached to the seatbelt latch and tensioner, and which stay with the seat. Remove the ones for the seat. In addition, on the passenger side, the cables route through a small hole. One plug just unplugs from the yellow housing, but there are two wires that have pins that latch into the yellow housing body itself. 

Look at it carefully, and you can see where you push down  to release the pins. You have to release it at the front, and again to get it all the way out of the body. Working alone, there was no way I could take a picture of that. Both wires are black, so I marked one with tape so I could put back together the same way.

One of the cables that stays with the car actually is a jumper that plugs in near the seat also. You have to move that cable to the other seat.

9. Using a T50 Torx driver with a ratchet, remove the seatbelt latch and tensioner, and transfer it to the other seat. Route the cables, carefully put the yellow plug back together, and put everything in the car and button it up. Done!