1976 Palm Beach

TZE166V100710

 

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New Seats for the GMC

 

April 2009

 

 

 

 

How I went from the seats on the left to the seats on the right for less than $400.

What a great upgrade for a great price!

 

It all started when I read this from an email to the GMC mail list:

"Folks, I came upon a person in the area with a stash of honda Odyssey Middle Row seats. I bought this set for $100 from one seller, and another person here has a garage full of them. They take them out when they do wheelchair access conversions. They sell for $150 a pair and $150 for the middle thing which is also a center console. They have beige and grey. These are new and really nice. They are leather and smell nice too. I am putting them in my coach and possibly a set or two in my pickup. All I have to do is remove the latch bases and install some unistrut cross braces to bolt to the GMC swivel"

I jumped at the chance to get a set in tan.  I mailed a check to the address provided and held my breath that I would actually get seats.  To my pleasant surprise a few weeks later a pair of these arrived at my house in these boxes:

Thanks to -Chr$, Scottsdale, AZ for setting this up for us.

 

How to upgrade the front seating in a GMC in a very cost effective manner:

  1. Buy new Honda Odyssey middle seats from craigslist, eBay etc. for less than $400.
  2. Buy a quantity of 16  5/8-18 1" course thread cap screws, nuts and flat washers (you can reuse the 5/8-18 locknuts from the OEM setup). Use them to fasten the new seats to the OEM seat base. You can also reuse 4 of the fasteners that are surplus from taking the Honda seats apart.
  3. Buy a piece of Unistrut or Superstrut from Home Depot, Grainger etc.
  4. Gather up Metric and SAE tools, including TORX bits.
  5. Use the tools to remove the old GMC seats
  6. Dump old GMC seats
  7. Use the tools to remove the track mounting hardware from the new seats.
  8. Cut 4 pieces of Superstrut 18" long
  9. Modify 2 of the pieces to allow clearance between OEM seat base swivel lever and seat pivot bolt.
  10. Install seats
  11. Admire your new leather seats that could end up costing less than $450.

My thanks to all that did this upgrade before I even thought about attempting it.  Thank you, Chris C., Bob de K, Rob A., Jim W. and Gene for consolidating all the information in one place.  Your efforts made what looked like a complicated job, an easy one.

Follow this link to a gallery of photos I took of my seat installation.

Follow this link to gmcmotorhome.info where there are other links relating to GMC seats:

 

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