swivel seats
Brooke says: I love the swivel seats. They open up this space and make it into a living room.
Doug says: It becomes not a car anymore. Without them, what, we’d sit cross-legged on the floor together? Or we’d have to find a space outdoors every time. I don’t want to say they’re necessary, but they’re definitely excellent.
The passenger side is from Van Upgrades. It’s sturdy, but walls off the space under the passenger seat, and the lever is a metal plate that sometimes gets stuck and bites you. But it’s half the price of a Scopema swivel seat adaptor, which we have on the driver’s side. The Scopema lever is a plastic handle, and the design allows you to access the underside of the seat easily.
The installation directions are straightforward, but it’s definitely a two-person job.
This time we had to truss up our seat while we figured out a workaround for the misaligned bolt holes.
We ran into an issue with the Scopema seat that turned out to be fairly common: The base plate of the swivel seat attaches to the seat pedestal with four bolts, but the holes for the bolts didn’t line up. We tried hitting the seat pedestal with a hammer (old mechanic’s trick, according to Doug) but couldn’t force it into place. After a bit more trial and error, we discovered that just one of the holes was wonky. We lined the other three up, used a thinner bolt in the wonky hole, and secured it with a washer and a nut. Simple fix and it works perfectly.
One more note on the swivel seats: They sound like they’re breaking every time you use them. When you turn the seat, the bolts that hold the seat rails to the swivel knock against the bolts that hold the swivel base to the seat. You could try using washers to back the top bolts out, but as far as we can tell, it doesn’t cause damage.
Doug says: Seriously, they’re a pain in the ass, but we really love them. I wouldn’t have pictured our setup without them.
Brooke says: Yeah, when you first told me about them, I was like, “That doesn’t sound necessary.” I was dead wrong; they’re essential.