Any updates?


I'm guessing you reinstalled the OEM seat since you received a new lower seat assembly. Is everything working again with the OEM seat installed?

 

I put the Sparco seat back in Sat. night with a new soldered resistor and crimped the connectors very securely onto the oem yellow airbag wires for a track day at Road America Sunday. They held up all day and so far so good. The weird part is this is a 4.7 ohm resistor and you run a 2.2. I also used a different company for the resistor and this one measured dead on. I really hope it was just a bad resistor or connection.

 

Good news!

Either resistor should work. Just as long as you have enough resistance that the ECU thinks the air bag is still connected to the circuit but not so much resistance that it thinks there's a problem with the air bag.

Those wire taps can be finicky... I had problems getting a good connection with those wire taps when I first did mine... Now that you've got the resistor hard wired into the circuit you should eliminate those wire taps as an issue.

 

Yeah, I don't want to jinx it, but so far so good and driving hard at Road America subjected the car to a lot more g force and driving cycles than normal so I really expected to see an airbag light while at the track.

 

We were finally able to find the cause of my factory seat not moving forward and backward. Turns out the "brain" of the seat probably got fried when I plugged it directly into the wiring in the floor trying to get back my power mirrors based on a suggestion by another forum member *cough* 2Gornot2G *cough*

So do NOT plug this directly into the wiring in your floor unless you feel like sending your electrical system into limp mode and towing your car into the shop.




Here is the circuit board from inside. Just below the black Panasonic box on the left you can see where it got fried.

 

Hahaha. Don't blame me... I specifically mentioned that you would need to keep the wiring harness from the factory seat to plug the box in. I never even considered trying to plug the control box directly to the chassis wiring harness, so I'm not sure where you got that information from. I even posted a pic of the part number on the wiring harness I purchased so I wouldn't have to pull apart my OEM driver's seat. See posts 107 and 117 in this thread.


Thankfully replacement seat control modules are inexpensive on ebay so it shouldn't be costly to fix.

 

Yeah, me and directions don't always mix. But it does seem strange that the wiring harness would fix the issue since it will not be plugged into anything when under my Sparco seat.

Everything is working on my factory seat now and I still could plug in the old fried control box to see if my mirrors work, but I don't know if I want to risk screwing up the wiring harness or anything else in the car based on what happened last time.

 

Yeah, I agree. Seems crazy that they would make the connectors the same so you could "accidentally" (or not so accidentally in your case) plug the chassis harness directly into the seat control box.


If you decide you want to use the control box to keep your mirrors when you have the Sparco seat installed then I would suggest picking up a used driver's seat wiring harness off ebay. You can get the part number off your OEM wiring harness that installed in your OEM drivers seat and just match that. The only caveat to this is that you will have keep the entire wire harness intact so you will have a whole bundle of extra wires under your seat.

 

That's kind of what I figured about the wiring harness. I was planning to use the one from my factory seat, but it is really not a big deal to lose the power mirrors. Now my wife won't change them the few times she drives the car.

Logically it makes absolutely no sense that plugging the wires from the car into the wiring harness that is not plugged into anything = OK, but plugging the wires from the car directly into the control box = short out the control box and throw your car into electronic limp mode so it has to be towed to the dealership.

 

Hahaha. I actually can't remember the last time I adjusted my mirrors anyway.


And my wife won't drive my G anymore so I don't have to worry about that.


There's power running through that chassis harness and it is meant to fed through the seat wiring harness first... and by plugging it directly into the seat control box you sent power to the wrong terminals on the control box which obviously blew a circuit in the control box. It isn't uncommon for car manufacturer's to use the same style connector in multiple places on a car so you do have to be very careful when messing with the wiring on modern cars. The G also has two of the same connectors behind the HVAC and radio so you have to be very careful when removing and reinstalling the dash pieces too.

 

Good to know on the radio. I'd like to meet the engineer who thought that was a good idea to make the same exact plug for something that could cause a huge problem if actually plugged in. Probably some accountant pinching pennies responsible for that terrible decision.

I put my Sparco seat back in, hopefully for the last time. I have swapped seats so many times that one of the original airbag wires finally separated so I just cut the plug off and wired the resistor directly into the oem wires. So far so good.

 

I recently took some measurements. Lowering the Bride seat rails as much as possible brought my Sparco seat down almost exactly one inch front and rear. (If you bring the front of the factory seat all the way down it can also drop an inch, however the real difference is having your butt an inch lower.)

Dropping the seat an inch does not sound like much, but it is the difference between having to tilt my head sideways with a helmet to sitting comfortably all day for two track days at speed. The other difference is that for me it feels a lot better sitting low. The times I put the factory seat back in made me feel like I was sitting up way too high.

It was a lot of work to get here, but this Sparco R600 seat at this height is substantially better in every way than the factory seat. By far one of the most rewarding upgrades to the car so far.

 

I took the connectors off the factory seat and saudered a 2.2 ohm resistor in on each. With a meter I see 2.2 ohns on the connector I made so they are good. Did the did reset and the light still comes on. Took battery off for 2 days connected back light came back on. Did did reset and it still flashes. Any ideas on what could be wrong.

 

If you are sure you did the air bag reset procedure correctly (it took me several tries before I got it right the first time) then you might want to try a 4.7 ohm resistor instead. I know some people running 2 ohm resistors, others are running 2.2 ohm and some are running 4.7 ohm. Did you happen to check the resistance of your OEM air bag for reference?

 

John- It sounds like you have good connections if you soldered them and it sounds like your resistor is measuring accurately. This car is super sensitive to those two things so hopefully you have it set.

Like 2G said, your timing has to be perfect with the airbag light reset procedure for it to work. It could also be the 4.7 ohm resistor works on your car instead of the 2.2.

Did you disconnect the battery before you took out the factory seat and only reconnect it after you had all the new wiring in? I also discovered that if you leave the battery hooked up while you make the change, you usually have to start over to get rid of the airbag light. Simply disconnecting the battery did nothing at all to reset my airbag light even though a lot of people on this website seem to think it works.