Dave Solberg

Upgrading an RV Driver Seat

Dave Solberg
Duration:   3  mins

Description

Most modern RVs come equipped with standard, fixed driver and passenger seats that are inexpensive and oftentimes uncomfortable. That’s why we always recommend an upgrade to RV owners who are able. Numerous manufacturers like Bradd and Hall create affordable RV driver seat options that will make your travels more comfortable and adaptable, with options such as motorized adjustments and lumbar support.

In this free video lesson, RV maintenance and upgrade expert Dave Solberg walks you through the thought process for replacing your standard RV driver seat and passenger seat with better models. He discusses the aspects you should consider when shopping for new seats including the best manufacturers, as well as roadblocks you might run into when trying to upgrade.

For instance, driver and passenger seats on some older RVs were installed by welding the pedestal into the floor. Dave discusses a couple of solutions you can utilize if you find this is the case on your rig. You should also figure out where the seatbelts fasten, as this can affect your buying options. And of course, prior to ripping out the old seats and make your upgrade purchase, be sure that your new RV driver seat will in fact fit your steering wheel setup. Know before you buy!

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3 Responses to “Upgrading an RV Driver Seat”

  1. Alva Emmertson

    I am considering a natural sheepskin seat cover, to make us more comfortable. I am no longer able to crawl around to replace the entire seat and pedestal. When I drive a semi truck, the air ride seats are not much more comfortable than my moho seats, the constant bouncing from the air ride seats, gets annoying on rough Utah and Arizona roads.

  2. Ray Borzini

    We’re purchasing a 2020 class c Jayco on a Ford Chasis. The seats are manual. I’d like to change the driver seat to electric. Any suggestions? Ray Borzini

  3. Judy Haase

    How to turn my passenger seat on a CrossFit class b van

Typically and motorized RV is going to come with fairly inexpensive drivers and passenger seats a lot of people don't take the time to upgrade that option when they first get on they may go with a little leather or something like that. We chose to upgrade the seats in this one they were the typical standard with the manual reclined slide swivel and we upgraded to the an electric version that had additional lumbar support but there was some things we really had to consider first of all that whole driver's and passenger's compartment. We, we upgraded the fabric in that as well We took the carpet out, the engine cover We're putting a vinyl Woven like we've seen in the rest of the insight here but they had the strongest glue that I've ever found in the RV industry in that thing and so we had to actually scrape it off manually and then come back and put a Luon sub floor on it before we put our fabric and our motor cover back in and we're gonna cover the motor cover with a matching type of a material to the chairs. Now, the chairs, we went to Bradd and Hall which we've talked about in some of our videos beforehand and there were several options that we had we went with the, it was a leather like it's not a true leather, but it is a it's a vinyl with a soft vinyl matched the color that would come in with the fabric that we had inside and by going with a lumbar support and by going with a little larger base on this it created a challenge with the pedestal so we had to take the old pedestals out and we see one here and this was very, very difficult it was quite a challenge We had a couple of guys with breaker bars and pipes the impact wrench would not take the four bolts that were out there. So, you know you gonna have quite a struggle getting this in. Now there are some companies that actually weld that pedestal to that foundation if they have a metal flooring in that. So that's something that you're going to definitely want to watch beforehand, or look at beforehand if you gonna upgrade something, take a look at what you have in stock right now in that unit is it welded? Do you have to cut that weld off? which is I wouldn't recommend doing that you know, where your seatbelts are going to be fastened to some of them go right to the pedestal so on one of these we gonna have to put a new seatbelt bracket over on the other side the passenger side did go down to the floor so that one can stay and get bolted through the floor on this unit. The next thing we have to look at then is where that seat raises and lowers according to the, the steering wheel. And one of the models that we first chose to look at we had to come back out here we had to measure where that steering wheel column was at that the place where he was driving since it tilts and that, you know, just bring it too far up knees would be too close to the steering wheel no matter where we put it So we had to go to a different option with that so some of the things you want to take a look at is where that passenger seat is going to sit according to a diesel pusher model how high the pedestals going to be what options the lumbar support and, you know, the type of material.
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