[vigsom]

Dear All,

Sharing my 2 day long struggle to get the power seats of a 2007 Camry back to working order:

The Problem

This 2007 Camry had seen approx. 6 inches of water inside the cabin during the recent floods in Chennai .

The owner(a very close friend) reported that the seat adjustments had stopped working post flood.

I was out of India and couldn't help him so as soon as I returned , I embarked on this project to try and get the seats back to working ways.

Observations

* None of the adjustments except the seat back were working
* Seat slide mechanism and metal panel were badly corroded
* Driver seat has three motors below the seat - one for height adjustment , one for travel and one for lumbar support(I think)
* Passenger seat has only one motor below the seat for travel adjustment.
* Removed the seats and found that the couplers for the seat motors and the seat airbags were intact
* The seat adjustment switch panels showed sulfation(copper sulphate) and some contact points were missing(shown in yellow in the pic below)


Restoration

Motors

* The lowest motor under the seat was the one that controls seat travel from towards the pedals to away from the pedals .

* The worm gears , drive cable from motor to gear(resembles a speedo cable inner) and the motor inner bearing were all jammed.

* Had the whole motor drive assembly, bearings cleaned with wd40, regreased with gel grease and boxed up.

*Armature and commutator were cleaned with iso propyl alcohol. Carbon brushes were in good order

* Repeated the above for the other two motors(which needed some effort as their screws were not accessible)

* repeated the exercise for the passenger seat bottom motor which was equally bad

Switch Assembly

* The 4 way switch assembly of both the driver seat and the passenger seat were in bad shape - lot of copper sulphate and contact points had disintegrated.

* The switch assembly was not available

* We had to get down to using contact points from a spare circuit board , provide a copper contact plate below and solder jumpover wires from the contact points to the nearest available 12V supply lines to establish continuity.

* The new points are encircled green and the broken contact lines are shown in red in the picture below



* The seat slide mechanism needed some wd40 to help it regain its lost touch

Results

* Seats motors were coupled back
* Motors were observed to work normal
* Seats installed back and we were back to pre-flood days - voila.

Spent Rs.2500 ; this exercise took two full days and was a tough challenge , but overcome

Apologies for not clicking more pics as the work was more important than the advertising.

MODS:Please club this with another thread if you wish ; I couldn't find any thread on power seats and hence opened a new one for readers.