Seat Bolts

[jsutherl]

When I drove home my new-to-me 2008 georgtown I noticed that the drivers seat felt very wobbly. Shortly after that I drove it to put gas in it with a friend in the passenger seat. He said that every time I used the breaks he felt like he was tipping forward.

So I took a look. Each of the two front seats was held down with four large carriage bolts. The bolts go from the bottom of the seat pedestal through the floor and have a nut and a washer under the coach. The nuts are plainly visible just inboard of the front tires.

So there are eight bolts total, four for each seat. On my coach two bolts where reasonably tight on the passenger seat. One bolt had no nut at all. The rest all had their nuts backed off at least half an inch. Letting the pedestal wobble around on both seat.

I tried to tighten the bolts but as you probably know carriage bolts have domed heads. The only thing preventing them from spinning is a square bit under the dome that fits into a square hole on the seat pedestal. Apparently at the factory (or with the previous owner) these square holes had been rounded out. So when I tried to tighten the nuts underneath the coach the bolts would just spin.

I took a trip to my local bolt supply place with the one old bolt that had no nut. I got eight regular bolts (not carriage) in the same size with washers and nets.

You’d think that this would have been an easy job but these where the hardest bolts to remove that I’ve ever come across. Four hours and two broken wrenches later I’d removed one nut from one bolt.

Finally I ended up having to cut the others off with an angle grinder.

The seats are far more solid now. If I’d been in a major accident who knows if those seats would have pulled out of the floor. The seats still wobble a bit at the bearing that lets the seats spin around. Looks like that is the next project.

So you might consider checking your seat bolts. It takes about a minute to do and all you need is a flash light. I'll try to take a picture and post it in the future.

[kenandterry]

Obviously a serious concern.........and something that someone must have known about. Congrats on being persistant enough to correct. I'll be checking ours when we get our unit back from the dealer.

[kvtaylor]

Thanks for information. Ours were tight. That coach must have been built on a monday or friday. had a GM truck once that practly everything was wrong in the assembly of it. Got to know the service manager by his first name since we had to go back so many times.