One Weird Trick Fixes Ugly Car Seats!

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Not so weird—just go to the junkyard and get better ones.

Just before I started dating her, my future wife bought a brand-new 2004 Subaru Legacy Outback wagon with the Rocky Mountain Edition package and five-on-the-floor manual transmission.

One wedding, 18 years, and 150,000 miles later, it had a new clutch, a new center differential, a pair of new head gaskets (no, they never blew, but they were past their expiration date), a Lexus SC400 horn upgrade… and grimy, battered front seats. Since that car has become the household beater and makes a lot of junkyard trips, I decided I'd keep my eyes open for some nicer seats.

This is a base-grade four-cylinder/5-speed car in that maroon color you see on 60% of 2000-2004 Legacies (known as "Regatta Red" in the Subaru world), which means the interior is done up in easily stained beige crypto-velour upholstery. Because I live in Denver, the local junkyards are overflowing with members of the 2000-2004 Legacy family, many of which have seats in fairly decent condition.

I can find plenty of Legacies from that generation with leather seats, sure, but I have learned from my obsession with the Toyota Century and JDM machinery in general that cloth seats are both quieter and more comfortable.

The hard part, if you want a matched pair of junkyard seats in nice condition, is finding a car with a good driver's seat. My wife isn't enough of a hooptie lover (yet) to accept mismatched front seats in the only new car she's ever owned, despite the ol' Outback's body being pretty thoroughly tenderized by hailstorms and parked-car-sideswiping drunk drivers, so my challenge was to find a car of the correct Legacy generation with a nice front seat behind the wheel. That probably meant a car that had seat covers for most of its career. All this will be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time in car graveyards, but we here at Autoweek like to offer advice to our less junkyard-centric readers from time to time.

So, just after shooting a 1980 Ford F-100 at one of my favorite Front Range boneyards, I peeked into every 2000-2004 Legacy and Legacy Outback in search of good front seats. This '04 Outback had an engine hoist poised over its engine compartment but was a new arrival.

The body showed some damage, but it didn't look like a car that endured excessive abuse during its life.

The upholstery was a stain-hiding gray color, and the front seats looked great. The passenger-side one was just about perfect, and the driver's-side seat looked good despite a bunch of fasteners dumped there by a junkyard shopper who tore up the dashboard to get… well, I couldn't tell.

I took the Sambar home and grabbed a hand truck (car seats are heavy and bulky, as well as being easy to get dirty if you carry them by hand through a junkyard), then got to work. I started with the easy passenger side. These seats are held in via a bolt at each end of the two tracks, which is a typical setup for Japanese cars built since the 1970s.

Also typical is the means used by Subaru to prevent rear-seat passengers from touching exposed bolt heads and brackets with their bare feet: plastic covers that must be pried off to reach the fasteners.

It's a good idea for car seats to remain firmly in place in crashes, so manufacturers generally hold them down with beefy grade-8 (or better) bolts and add thread-lock for good measure. You might need a long-ish breaker bar to bust these bolts loose (in this case, an ordinary ratchet did the job).

Once the seat was unbolted, it was time to disconnect any electrical cables. Modern car seats always have one or more electrical connections, for seatbelt warning sensors if nothing else. While the driver's side of a 2004 Outback has power adjustment, the passenger's-side seat is manual (though it does have a heater); the cable is a simple three-wire affair. Cut the cable on the car-harness side of the connector, so you'll have a spare connector just in case.

I tied the seat to my hand truck and wheeled it to the cashier's counter. Colorado Auto & Parts charges $42.00 for a manual bucket seat (plus $2.00 core), which is quite reasonable in the 2022 junkyard world. Then I loaded everything up into the Sambar and headed home.

I couldn't get the driver's seat out of the junkyard car on that trip because it had been adjusted to the all-the-way-back position and it's a big job to move a power seat without power. So, I decided to swap in the passenger seat and then return for the other one. Look, there's the legendary "butt-thumper" underseat subwoofer that I use for so many car-parts boombox projects!

Personally, I think that a "harlequin" interior with every possible junkyard-obtained upholstery color would be fun, but the registered owner of this Outback disagrees.

A two-buck core charge isn't much, but it's nice to get paid something to dispose of your unwanted old car seat. The metal in this one will soon re-enter the global scrap ecosystem.

I came equipped with the 18-volt battery from my Milwaukee cordless drill and a cheap adapter that makes it simple to connect power to automotive electrical components. Don't put it in your toolbox with the adapter connected or you might get a fire or worse. Cars are made to operate with 13.8 volts DC while running, so 18 volts will run a power seat just fine.

So as to avoid shorts (and resulting electrical fires, which are frowned on by junkyard employees), I connected the positive lead from my battery to the battery side of the main input fuse in the Outback's fusebox. Then I ran the ground lead to a bolt on the firewall.

This convinced the car that it had a real battery again, which allowed me to move the power seat to expose the mounting bolts (and, as an added bonus, booted up the digital odometer, letting me see that this Subaru drove 140,900 miles during its life). If I'd been sufficiently motivated, I might have hot-wired the radio to have some tunes while I worked.

The driver's seat is held in with four bolts, just like the passenger's side seat; the only significant difference in mounting is the larger number of electrical cables.

A power bucket seat costs $54.00 plus $2.00 core at CAP. Into the Sambar it goes.

Be gentle with the electrical connectors when installing replacement seats in your car, because you'll be very sad if you need to fix broken wires and/or connectors. I tilted up the seats to disconnect and connect the harnesses, once the seat mounting bolts were removed.

That's it! These techniques should be transferable to most cars made during the last quarter-century or so (though cars that don't let you adjust power seats with the ignition off might require battery power to be spliced in directly). Next, I'll need to add the in-dash cupholder from an L.L. Bean Edition Outback, and perhaps even the factory McIntosh audio system.

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