I got the seat out of the box and pulled the tractor into the garage... Looked at how the OEM seat is attached and realized this was going to be a project to swap over. My current seat flips forward on 4 bolts that are at the very front of the seat bottom.. I'm going to have to make a steel plate, drill holes to mount it where the seat now bolts and then figure out where to drill more holes in the plate to mount the slides for the new seat... Not exactly a quick easy operation. .. I'm also hoping the new seat actually fits in the same space as the OE one... As the new one looks to be quite a bit larger.
I got mine installed today - with a few issues.
The footprint of the new seat is definitely bigger than the original on my
B3030. I had to remove the seat belt retractor to make room and I need to find a way to get that back in - even though I rarely use the seat belt I think it needs to be there. The retractor is on the left side. On the right side I had to get around a problem where the new seat's reclining lever was interfering with the linkage for the hydraulic remote lever. I ended up mounting the seat just slightly off-center - towards the seat belt retractor side and away from the hydraulic remote lever side. It's off-center by maybe 1/2 inch at most and is virtually unnoticeable.
The weight of the new seat caused the seat sensor switch to be closed even when the seat is empty. A quarter-sized washer under the rubber cap of the rear vertical suspension spring seems to have corrected the problem but I'll probably need another fine-tune there before it's good.
I did not use the slides that came with the new seat. The original suspension mechanism and slide channels are still being used. I wanted to keep as much of the original structure as I could - mainly so that I could retain the flip-forward hinge. I can still flip the new seat up on top of the steering wheel. This also allowed me to retain the second seat sensor switch - the one that allows the PTO to run while not on the tractor - by flipping the seat forward.
I did need to drill 2 new bolt holes - one on each of the hinge brackets that bolted to the bottom of the old seat. I was able to use one of the existing holes on those brackets so I saved some drilling there. I also needed to drill 4 holes in the 1/4 in thick support plate that came with the new seat. I used just the forward-most of the 2 plates - the rear plate I removed from the seat.
I sit up a little higher in the new seat so I need to get used to the new feel to the pedals. The armrests I am not too crazy about. They have a hard vinyl feel and they seem a little too low. When you adjust them higher all that does is point the front of the armrest up and therefore the whole armrest is at an angle. I'm sure I'll get used to it. There was no way to transfer the armrests from the old seat.
The hardest part was trying to measure where to drill the holes. Every time I thought I had it down something shifted slightly and it was time to start over. I ended up drilling an extra pilot hole in one of the pieces but discovered the error before moving up to the larger drill bits.
Also a pain was removing the hardware from the bottom of the new seat once I got it out of the box. They were on there extremely tight and I was starting to round out the phillips slots by the time I got them off.
In the end, I like the way it all turned out but I'll probably keep the old seat in storage just in case.
:shocked:....
