93XJeeper

Alright, so, after much researching, I was unable to find any info on putting front ZJ seats in a pre-97 Jeep Xj. There are plenty of threads about swapping them into 97 and up jeep but none for the 97 downers. SO, I decided to do it myself and make a write up for others wanting to do the same thing. I am not going to cover the rear bench seat in this writeup because there is already a thread or two on how to do that. So here we go.







Here are the power seats I got from a friend who was parting out his ZJ. they are full power, heated seats with lumbar support. I will only be using the power option as I don't care for the heated seat to much.

First thing that I did was get a piece of cardboard and push it over the mounting studs for the old seats on the floor board. this will give you your dimension/layout on where your new mounting points need to be. make sure you reuse the same studs for mounting. if you try to shortcut and drill holes In your floor board and stick a nut underneath, i doubt it will hold very long. The factory mounting studs come up through the frame which makes them nice and sturdy. keep in mind, this is the passenger side that I am doing first.



















After doing so, compare that to the Zj mounting brackets. the rear brackets are already made to be flat against the floor so all you need to do is drill the rivet out as seen in the pics and rotate the bracket so that it will be the correct width of the mounting studs we got on the cardboard. once this is done, weld it back so it will stay like that. when doing this, you will notice that the entire seat is offset to one side of the seat bracket, so depending on which seat your working on, rotate the corresponding bracket so the seat has even pressure in the middle and not more overhang/offset.
















now that the rear mounts are finished, we can move to the front. take a piece of angle iron and cut it to the appropriate length, weld it to the brackets as shown and now you will have a nice flat mounting serface. make sure to grind the welds flush so they keep the bottom flat. then use that piece of cardboard with the stud holes to mark and drill the holes for mounting in the angle iron. also, you will probably have to trim a little off the ends of the angle iron to help it fit against the fire wall once installed.

































then, all you got to do is paint and install!


















Heres where I had to trim the angle iron





Heres where I had to trim the angle iron as well














NOW, time for the drivers side, I didn't do as well as a job for this side. Main reason being that I didn't realize that the transmission tunnel stuck out further and so when then the seat was all said and done, the seat slider rail hit the tunnel keeping it from mounting to the floor all the way. Therefore I ended up adding more angle iron which made the seat higher, maybe a little too high. but here is what I did.

So, once again use a piece of cardboard to get a template for the mounting studs. then drill out, rotate, and weld the bracket. now, because I messed up the driver side as I said earlier, you may not need to do this step because I ended up welding a small piece of angle iron on this to make it higher anyways.





















Next, for the front, I did like I did the other side except, I had to cut the console side mounting foot off and also had to orientate the angle iron in a different position in order to clear the transmission tunnel. But once again, because I messed up, I ended up double stacking the angle iron to make the seat higher.




























Now, here is where I ended up double stacking more angle iron due to the seat hitting the trans tunnel. in case you are unsure as to what was hitting and causing the clearance issues, it was the little slider/track for when you adjust the seat back and forth.






















for this rear piece of angle iron, do the opposite of what I did. make sure the angle iron is flipped the opposite direction so you can get to the studs to put the nuts on from behind the seat. Otherwise, you are going to have a tough time like me getting under the seat to get the nuts on.










So, after I did this, I was able to bolt the seat into place. The seat is a little higher the the passenger seat because of this. I am about 6', maybe 6'1" and my head is about an inch from the ceiling. I hated it at first but now I'm am used to it. I may go back I try to find a way to lower it someday but unless this bothers me to do so, I wont. only things so far that do, is I occasionally have to tilt my head down to see traffic lights and my steering wheel tilt is almost maxed out going upward. but once again, I'm 280lbs and almost 6'1" and it doesn't really bother me.








All that's left to do now is wire up the seats and your done.

Red is + 12v for power seats, Black is - for power seats, Violet/brown is + for memory function, white/black is - for memory function, light blue/black is - for heated seats, and pink/dark green is + 12v for heated seats. I only used the power seat function which I ran a 14 awg wire straight to the battery with a 20 amp fuse. then I just grounded it on the seat bracket.

So that's all for my ZJ Seat install/write-up. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below.