Passenger Seat Mod

Shall36 · December 5, 2020

So if your wife is like mine, she hates the non-power passenger seat in your truck. The seat is too low (and can't be raised) and feels like you fall into it because there's no lower back support. On long trips, she would sit on a pillow and stuff a towel behind her lower back.

The manual passenger seat has two main flaws: it's way too low and it has no support.

I have a 10-way power seat on the driver side and the lumbar support works pretty good. So I took off the back panel to see how the power lumbar adjuster works. There's a plastic panel attached to the seat frame on one side and a motorized cable on the other. The motor pulls the cable taught to increase lumbar support and relaxes to less support. On the passenger seat, that lower panel is a wire mesh attached by metal rods to the seat frame and it's obviously so slack that it won't provide any support unless the seat occupant is of very good size (my wife's not small but she's not big). I found some packing material that came with a TV...it's not Styrofoam...it's more of that plastic webbing stuff...and shaped it to the right width and right thickness. I shoved that between the seat back and the wire support. With a little trial and error, it's just right and very comfortable. Second problem solved.

The first problem of being too low is actually a really easy fix. There's a fellow who makes rails that will raise up the passenger seat to the same height you would get if you had a power seat. It was an easy install and less than $100. https://seating-solutions.com/

The seat is much more comfortable and my wife is thrilled.

Prior to doing this mod, I considered buying a new truck and buying a power seat out of the junkyard. The first option was really expensive. Even a junkyard power seat was $300 and the ones I found didn't have heat. I know some folks like to swap in a complete leather interior, but I didn't want to drop the $1,500+ to do that plus the wiring nightmare. The manual passenger seat isn't the greatest seat in the world, but for less than $100 and about 1 hour of time, you can make it a lot more comfortable.