One door off, and front/rear seat and seat rail removal

Well, that's one. :)

The bolts holding the door hinges to the body are pretty well stuck. Not long ago, I ordered a couple of cans of Kroil from the manufacturer - they had a deal where you get one free can with an order, so I just ordered one can and ended up with two. Not a bad deal. And this stuff seems to work a bit better than the Deep Creep. I've been hitting the hinge areas with this stuff now and again, and then occasionally giving the bolts a try with the screwdriver/wrench combo. Amazingly, the left rear door bolts at the bottom all came loose with a minimum of fuss - and since the top hinge bolts were all loose from before, I was good to go.

Next up is removing the seats. The service manual CDs have pretty light (and wrong, I'm finding - more on that later) instructions on removing the seats. First up is the back seat.

First step is to loosen the bottom of the seat, by simply pushing downward on the front edge; the whole seat slides free of the back part.

Bottom part of seat is now free.

Out it comes!

Now to remove the back part.

The service manual says to free up a pair of bolts from inside the trunk compartment. It doesn't really say *where* these bolts are, though. At first I try these, along the bottom of the trunk area...

...but no - it's the pair at the top of the trunk area.

Then it's a matter of pulling the back of the seat forward a bit, so those posts come free of the body - and then lifting the whole piece upwards, to free it from a pair of metal tabs.

A better shot of the metal tabs and the spots on the seat back that they slide into.

And those two bolts at the bottom of the trunk compartment? They're for a pair of seat adjustors - once the seat backing is in place, these are threaded back out from the rear (the ends of the bolts have a slot for a flathead screwdriver), to push up against the seat back to help prevent vibration.

Now the front seats.

The service manual instructions for removal say to slide the front seats forward and off the rails - but this doesn't work! The bulge for the transmission prevents the seats from moving that far forward.

A little searching on the Ponton mailing list archives yields some results - someone else had issues with this just a few weeks back, in fact. The solution is to remove the stops on each seat mount, and slide the seats off the back ends of the rails. The stops are on the outsides of each seat, held by a pair of Phillips head bolts. Easy enough to remove (aside from the bodily contortions) and the seats slide right off.

All the seats are out!

Now to remove the rails. Each rail is held on with four bolts. A bit of penetrant on these helps a lot.

The passenger side seat rails have some leaf springs the driver's side doesn't have - these are apparently to help prevent vibration and noise for when there is no passenger. As the driver's seat always has someone in it, they're not needed on those rails.

The last task is to remove the clips for the rail mount bolts. These take a bit of wrestling to get out, as they want to hang on the other end of the rectangular openings as they're removed. Just have to pull back and up at the same time.