Half of Rear Folding Seat Stuck

[earthwormjim]

Was going through my car yesterday, playing around and I noticed half of the rear fold-down seat is stuck. The little release lever beneath the seat ended up underneath the floor carpet at some point, and I guess it got bent over time.

When I lift up on it, it won't release the seat lock. Anyone have any tips for releasing a stuck fold down seat back?

[D.Martijn]

Do you have a picture of the bend lever?

[cory58]

Since our Bimmer brethren on the other side of the pond have much more experience with Tourings, you may want to post your question on e30owners.com. I have gotten some good info there.

Cory

[earthwormjim]

I'll get a picture this weekend, thanks for the tip about e30owners, it's just a very hard phrase to search for, get lots of junk threads.

[rikaro]

that's great if you can bring us some photos. mine is broken as well :(

[earthwormjim]

Took some pictures for you rikaro, managed to solve my problem too.

First picture is of the good side, you can see how the arm should be:



Here is the bad side, I originally found it underneath the carpet too, so at first I thought it was missing! I found crumbs of the handle under the carpet too.




I couldn't get my phone to focus, but here is a close up of the lever mechanism, and issue number 1:


If you can make it out, the lever is in front of the little tab on the ring it is supposed to actuate. It's supposed to be behind the tab.


Here is the good side so you can compare:


That was easy enough to fix, just used some vice grips to rotate the ring and bent the tab to the correct shape.

Even after fixing that, I still couldn't get the seat to move, luckily for me, the previous owner didn't retain the cover on that side of the seat for the lock mechanism, so I had access to the innards:



A little nudging on the parts there, and it released. Turns out the real issue is that the Philips head screws were loose. After tightening them, everything works.

Might be a little ghetto, but I strongly recommend against putting the trim cover that covers the locking mechanism. As long as you have access to the mechanism, you can easily release it, that cover blocks access. The side bolsters and carpet do a good job of hiding things anyway.

[rikaro]

that's great info thanks!

going to go try it on mine later