decided to finish up my lock vacuum stuff and the interior work before digging into the turbo zero boost issue. I thought I'd be tidying up but I ended up sinking two days into various jobs.
Plastic wrapped my inner doors before putting my door cards back in.
Power washed the inside of my car. The area under my seat was foul. Same brown saucy stuff. Some noodles dried on to the floor. The car still stinks. I may have to go for enzyme pet cleaner. Looks better.
Dash after wood repair and glove box repair.
This was interesting. I got a good passenger seat from a 300CD at LKQ. I was thinking I'd strip the covers off it and put them on my seat. Same color and the springs were good. So good I decided to use the spring box too for the lower cushion and bolt my upper seat back to it. My seat back was good enough and it had the arm rest and lacked the funny pneumatic release button of the CD.
So I mated the CD spring box to the D seat back after removing some air lines and pneumatics. After messing around and sweating, my jaw dropped when I saw this.
I thought dang, what a gap between the two pieces. How can this be? I thought you could mix and match all this stuff. Must be because the CD needs different geometry to tip forward. So I took a good look at my seats. The seat springs were slightly different. The CD was shorter at the back. The CD seatback seemed a little longer on the bottom side.
The CD on the right doesn't have a J clip attachment at the back. It used hog rings. So I really couldn't swap covers which I thought of doing. I liked the CD's springs better. Mine were tired. So I decided I'd use the CD seat back. No arm rest. Use the pneumatic button to cover the hole. I'd taken it all apart for storage/disposal so I spent an hour putting it all back together. I forgot how to use string to pull the loops through the seat back and I had to install the seatback twice. I was kicking myself for taking everything apart. I figured I didn't need a CD seatback with the tip forward hinge hardware...I literally dug it out of my trash can on trash day today and set it aside. So I used it. I used the CD seatback with the CD seat with my rails.
Now I'm not sure this applies across the board. The CD appeared to be a upholstery redo job. There were some indications like staples on the J clip (not really j clip but the mb cardboard stuff) that didn't look OE. So maybe this doesn't apply across the board. I don't know for sure what the history of these seats are but it wasn't mix and match/plug n play.
The rails (story I was too embarrassed to tell) on the CD seat got ruined as I removed the seat at LKQ. Some genius had tried to pull the seat before me and rounded off the bolt. I tried everything to get that bolt out in the yard. It is a very tough steel. I pounded with a chisel and couldn't get through it. I hacksawed. I filed. I tried to drill with a hand crank drill which was all I had. I almost went down to lowes and bought a DeWalt Lithium angle grinder but I ended up using the chisel to cut the floor of the car open to free the seat. And hence I ruined the rails. No problem, I have rails. The swap was the puzzle as usual but I've solved it before.
Here is the result after many hours. I'm not sure my $50 seat was worth it but here it is and it looks just great. I got the seat back in the car tonight.
Tomorrow I'll start tackling the zero boost turbo. I started madly pulling vacuum lines and my new vacuum locks stopped working. Thankfully I know to save only the brown, yellow and black circuits. I'm gonna gut that EGR and flying saucer system.
I stopped by my local stealership after lunch and they ran my VIN. Trap Ox and Trap Cat work had been done in 91 and 97. No more free work to be done so I'm clear to start wrenching on that turbo.