L400 flat rear bench

[Green1]

As the general consensus appears to be that I do not know what I'm talking about, and cause more harm than good, I am removing this post so that others are not tricked in to following my ill-advised instructions.

[SSB]

Nice work! Very effective and simple too!

[Firesong]

What I noticed with this loaner L400 is that
the pictures show the rear seats stowed against the
sides folded forward and then up. Funny they aren't
mechanically able to unless you mess with them.

FS

[Green1]

When folded up the seats aren't "flat", they are instead "beyond flat" (about 20-30 degrees below the horizontal)
This fix allows you to set the bench to be FLAT (or any other position you want) without doing this mod the seats have a large range from about 30 degrees above flat, to 20 degrees below flat where the seat will not lock in.

[loki]

Thanks for posting this, it's something that annoyed me and was on the list to look into, it's a long list though and it was pretty far down :)

[thedjjack]

As the general consensus appears to be that I do not know what I'm talking about, and cause more harm than good, I am removing this post so that others are not tricked in to following my ill-advised instructions.

You may want to seek professional counseling...This seems to fall outside of "normal". Good luck

[Mr. Flibble]

As the general consensus appears to be that I do not know what I'm talking about, and cause more harm than good, I am removing this post so that others are not tricked in to following my ill-advised instructions.

Erm, I kinda liked this post. I was planning on doing the same thing to mine. It will be harder for me to do so without this post around to help guide me.

[psilosin]

Erm, I kinda liked this post. I was planning on doing the same thing to mine. It will be harder for me to do so without this post around to help guide me.

Google still has the original post complete with pictures cached...just search "L400 flat rear bench" and click the cached link. Might want to save the post and picts to your hdrive before it disapears for good if its something you are interested in.

[Mr. Flibble]

Erm, I kinda liked this post. I was planning on doing the same thing to mine. It will be harder for me to do so without this post around to help guide me.

Google still has the original post complete with pictures cached...just search "L400 flat rear bench" and click the cached link. Might want to save the post and picts to your hdrive before it disapears for good if its something you are interested in.

That is interesting, I searched the google cache for that before I posted, and I did not see it. I only saw the modern thread cached, which server did you hit?

[psilosin]

Funny...now when I search "L400 flat rear bench" on Google I don't even get a hit in the thread at all...was the first hit the day I posted. Likely Green1 read the post and then got into an argument with someone at Google about the legality of removing it from their search engine for 10-12 hours until the guy at Google decided it wasn't worth blowing his brains out over and deleted it. Second attempt was more successful...searched "http://www.delica.ca/forum/l400-flat-re ... -8220.html" in google...then hit the 'repeat the search with the omitted results included.' link and hoop there it is...

Originally written by Green1:
Anyone who has tried to camp in the L400 has probably noticed some annoying decisions made by the Mitsubishi engineers, primarily that the rear bench seat refuses to latch in a flat position, only about 30 degrees above horizontal ("seated" position), or 20 degrees below horizontal ("stowed" position for when you raise the seat up against the side of the vehicle).

Being that my backpacking trip for today was snowed out (springtime in Alberta!), I decided to figure out why, how, and what I could do about it.

First, when you take one of the seats out and take the plastic cover off, you see the basic mechanism:


Basically there's a gear wheel, and a lever that controls a pad of gears that meshes in to the wheel to lock everything in place.

When we zoom in, we can see the offending piece that blocks us from adjusting the seat to where we want:


There's a section of the gear wheel that contains a raised block that stops the gear pad from locking in to that area. This just won't do.

My initial plan was to remove the gear wheel and attack it with a hacksaw and a file, however this proved to be more difficult than I figured as all the components are pretty much welded/riveted in place. So instead, after removing the mechanism from the seats, I drilled a hole in the backing plate so that I could get a file and a saw blade on to the gear wheel and attacked it, end result is a continuous gear wheel where the gear pad can lock in place at any position you desire.



Observe the 3 teeth (2 grooves) on the wheel near the newly drilled hole, this is where that solid block was before, and was accomplished by attacking it with a rod-saw followed by a triangular file.
Note: the metal is quite hard, an initial attack on the wheel itself with a metal bit in a drill did nothing other than dull the drill bit.

Now when I sleep in the vehicle I can adjust the seat as flat as I want!

SAFETY NOTE: The Mitsubishi engineers obviously did this for a reason, the reason is safety, NEVER occupy the seats in a flat position while the vehicle is in motion, the seatbelts will not hold you in place in a collision if you aren't sitting up.

Even though I don't like the guy posts like this were good and I think he will later regret deleting his instructional posts since he obviously spent a lot of time doing them. Or this just might piss him off. Win either way...Paragon or renegade points...you decide (hopefully someone here plays Mass Effect to get that)