Well with winter just around the corner i thought i'd better get round to fixing my heated seats.
The seat base tends to work just fine but the seat back is a common failure issue as the wire to the upright element runs very close to the seat lock mechanism, the constant flexing of the wire and the risk of trapping it in the lock assembly can cause breaks and cuts.
Image 1 shows the location of the wire to the seatback
On first inspection all appears well, but looking more closely and there's the problem
Ok, now to repair the problem, you will need a soldering iron, some solder (duh
) flux, side cutters, long nose pliers, wire strippers, some heat shrink, some cable armour (not really that important but if it helps to prevent it being cut again and you have some, then use it) some more heatshrink large enough to go over the completed repair, some donor wire of the same gauge and colour and finally a means to heat the heatshrink (if your brave you can use a pencil gas flame, if your not use a hair dryer on the hottest setting ).
You need to get in the back seat with all the tools you need (getting in and out to fetch stuff is a pain), pull the seat all the way forward and wind the height adjuster all the way up to give yourself all the room you can get .
The difficulty of actioning the repair is pretty much dictated by the location of the damage, i had about 15 m/m of slack from the seat base after cutting the damaged section away using the side cutters and stripping the wires, this is where the long nose pliers come in handy, you should be able to pull a few inches of slack out of the seat back.
Image four shows the wires all stripped back and ready to repair
Prepair your donor wire by cutting to the required length, stripping and applying flux and solder, then using the long nose pliers gently grip the feed wire from the seat base, apply a little flux (flux by the way helps the solder to flow into the wire) and solder the donor wire to the feed wire ( using an old cloth under the repair will prevent any solder getting into the carpet if you have shakey hands), repeat the process for the other wire and you should be left with this:-
At this point you can either use insulation tape to cover the repaired exposed wires or you can do the job properly, hence the heatshrink, in this instance i'm going to use cable armour and then heatshrink over that to try to prevent any future damage, your repair should now look like this:-
Thats the worst part over with as its the hardest to get to, at this point you need to slip on the 2 lengths of heatshrink AND the heatshrink to cover the whole repair(this is why you need to gain some slack by pulling the wire out of the seatback a little, so you have room to slide the heatshrink up out of the way), then you can complete the connection by soldering the free ends of the donor wire to the seat back wire not forgetting to insulate the repair using either insulation tape or heatshrink:-
Slip the large length of heatshring down over the repaired section and after giving it some heat you should have a nice neat repair.
Once this is all done gently feed the slack back up into the seat back and making use of the extra length of the donor wire, reposition it further forwards away from the seat catch.
There you go, job done.
S
