There was one electrical job left on the car that I could do while waiting for the builders to finish and clear the driveway, and for the electronics engineers I had contacted about fixing the inverter control board to get back to me. The driver’s seat has both electric slide and tilt, in theory. But only the slide was working. Hit the switch for the tilt and you would get a click and tiny shudder but not a lot else. So I decided to sort this while the sun was out (briefly).
Hood down, I removed the two bolts and two nuts that hold the seat down, following the instructions on the ZRoadster forums. I then unplugged the two cables at the base and flipped the seat upside down to take a look at the mechanism.
Unsurprisingly for a 21-year-old car, it was pretty grim down there. Lost makeup containers, chewing gum packs and various other detritus, as well as some spider webs. I cleaned it all up as best I could then set about understanding how the mechanism worked.
The tilt mechanism is driven by a threaded rod that slides in and out of an aluminium retainer. I undid the nut from the pin that runs through one end of this retainer and then levered it out, thinking I would be able to spin it on the thread. But it wouldn’t turn at all.
Confident that I was on the right line, I grabbed an adjustable spanner and fitted it to the retainer before giving it a twist. Grudglingly, it turned.
When it got through 180 degrees I could see that the retainer was open on the other side and that a penny had dropped in and become wedged under the end of the screw thread. This in turn was gummed in with what looked like a melted sweet or two. Nice.
I cleaned all the gunk away and then levered the penny out with a screwdriver. It was pretty deformed by the time it came out. I applied some fresh grease and sure enough the screw now turned freely in and out of the retainer.
I reassembled it all, plugged it in and bolted it down. And voila, the seat tilt worked again. I now have a much better driving position low down and a lot more headroom.
