Raising the drivers seat.

All depends on the insurance company. Some say OK others want more money. As for safety you can buy raising rails on Ebay for a Defender. So what's the difference fitting the same on a Jimny???

The design of the defender rails is principally to lengthen the seat travel by around 70mm but with the bonus of increasing seat height by between 30-50mm. Lightning wants 10mm so the Defender design is to high.

Roger

Forget the Defender rail, It's about raising the factory seat height. Is it legal & safe to do so.
I think it is but the insurance part is a pain.
Claim it as a mobility car. Then you can have a chair that swivel's out & lowers you down.

My point is that on a defender the rails are engineered and sold covered by consumer law and potentially type approval suggesting fitness for purpose. Versus something cobbled together. I don't have issues with home engineered fixes if it's just for off road use on private land but if it going to be used on the road I don't see why things shouldn't professionally engineered or at minimum properly inspected.

Raising the seats will be my weekend project:

I am going to make some custom spacers from oilon: I still have some in my workshop and the stuff is EXTREMELY durable.

How difficult is it to remove the seats on a Gen4?

I'm a great fan of plastics for engineering use (easy to machine, cheap to buy) but I'm not sure of your choice of Oilon. You're choosing a material that's main selling point is inbuilt lubrication. Rather than slippery seat mounts wouldn't Delrin for example be a better choice? Only a thought and if you can source something else quicker, where's the harm? Chris

I agree with CC on this. Any form of plastic will have a degree of flex and link that to inbuilt lubrication and the result could be a degree of squirm that, over a period of time, could loosen the bolts. I used aluminium without any problems. Just remember is use similar mushroom headed bolts.
It's not necessary to remove the seat from the car. If you want to though, you will find that disconnecting the two electrical connections - seat belt warning and seat heaters - takes longer than removing 4 bolts!

Roger

CC Baxter wrote: I'm a great fan of plastics for engineering use (easy to machine, cheap to buy) but I'm not sure of your choice of Oilon. You're choosing a material that's main selling point is inbuilt lubrication. Rather than slippery seat mounts wouldn't Delrin for example be a better choice? Only a thought and if you can source something else quicker, where's the harm? Chris

Good point. I have already decided on Delrin. I think I still have a thick enough rod lying around.

The spacers are more visible from the outside than I thought and the green oilon will look downright weird...

Thanks for all the replies.

l will try some aluminium spacers. One thing, when you loosen the rear seat bolt, the captive nut inside also seems to become loose.
Can l just confirm that the nuts don't disappear inside the floor when you remove the bolts?

We’re you able to figure this out? Any info you could share would be helpful

I recently changed the seats in my Jimny, the original seats including rails are held in with four bolts, none of the nuts in the floor, moved, I assume they are welded in like the rear seat & seat belt fixings. One thing to note is the load area around the fixing bolts is fairly small and at least one bolt is at a different height from the others (the floor is uneven).

Anyway if you want to raise the seat a little, I don’t see why you couldn’t just buy longer bolts and use some spacers, I think the bolts are M10 (possibly M8), and there is plenty of room for a spacer, say 20 or 30mm square or round drilled for the bolts and length cut to suit.

If you were only going up 10-15mm, no one would notice, especially if you do both sides and with a decent spacer the strength and rigidity would be unchanged.

You can buy seat relocation brackets, these allow the seat to be moved further back, they are around 5mm thick, so you could mount them with a spacer and that would give a very solid platform for the raised seat.

Alternatively buy some of these tailored seat covers, they will raise you up a bit.

Robin