Height adjustment for front seats by swapping for factory 5th seat?

[Schadenfroid]

Looking for some advice / thoughts on seat height adjustment for particularly tall people. We're selling a '73 plate Ocean and a client came to look at it today. The only issue for them is that they were so tall (especially in the torso) that their head hit the roof - the only way to sit comfortably was with the shutter open. The easy way to reduce the height is probably to remove the swivel plate, but as our client was saying that kind of defeats the point of spending that much on a vehicle, they ideally wanted to be able to use both front seats as factory captains chairs (they wanted both because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use the passenger seat so they'd be forced to do all of the driving all of the time).

I've seen posts on here about taking height out of the cushions, when I had a thought. We have some spare 5th seats from other Californias vehicles where the padding and the base are much thinner - you can see from the photos the difference in the height of the base. Just wondering if anyone has done this, because if it's achievable it feels like it could take a good few inches off the height whilst keeping an almost factory look.

Really just after any ideas on how to get a couple of extra inches of height on both seats whilst keeping factory functionality, ideally in a reversible manner!

 

[vmaxkiddy]

Looking for some advice / thoughts on seat height adjustment for particularly tall people. We're selling a '73 plate Ocean and a client came to look at it today. The only issue for them is that they were so tall (especially in the torso) that their head hit the roof - the only way to sit comfortably was with the shutter open. The easy way to reduce the height is probably to remove the swivel plate, but as our client was saying that kind of defeats the point of spending that much on a vehicle, they ideally wanted to be able to use both front seats as factory captains chairs (they wanted both because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use the passenger seat so they'd be forced to do all of the driving all of the time).

I've seen posts on here about taking height out of the cushions, when I had a thought. We have some spare 5th seats from other Californias vehicles where the padding and the base are much thinner - you can see from the photos the difference in the height of the base. Just wondering if anyone has done this, because if it's achievable it feels like it could take a good few inches off the height whilst keeping an almost factory look.

Really just after any ideas on how to get a couple of extra inches of height on both seats whilst keeping factory functionality, ideally in a reversible manner!

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An option available on earlier Calis was a so called comfort seat which was non swivel but had height adjustment. I seem to remember that some owners added a swivel plate and got the best of both worlds.
Search the site for swivelgate.

 

[vbk1975]

Looking for some advice / thoughts on seat height adjustment for particularly tall people. We're selling a '73 plate Ocean and a client came to look at it today. The only issue for them is that they were so tall (especially in the torso) that their head hit the roof - the only way to sit comfortably was with the shutter open. The easy way to reduce the height is probably to remove the swivel plate, but as our client was saying that kind of defeats the point of spending that much on a vehicle, they ideally wanted to be able to use both front seats as factory captains chairs (they wanted both because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use the passenger seat so they'd be forced to do all of the driving all of the time).

I've seen posts on here about taking height out of the cushions, when I had a thought. We have some spare 5th seats from other Californias vehicles where the padding and the base are much thinner - you can see from the photos the difference in the height of the base. Just wondering if anyone has done this, because if it's achievable it feels like it could take a good few inches off the height whilst keeping an almost factory look.

Really just after any ideas on how to get a couple of extra inches of height on both seats whilst keeping factory functionality, ideally in a reversible manner!

View attachment 117841

View attachment 117842

One point to remember, as part of the Active Safety System, the front seats have Air Bags in the outer edge, which fire in various crash situations, the removable seat doesn’t contain this.

 

[Jimmylondon07]

How tall was this Gentleman?! Curious at what point this becomes an issue.

 

[Ch1pbutty]

Let the buyer their own research, or, sell the van to someone else. It's likely that the buyer will face similar issue with most vehicles.

Trying to swap the seat will be a pain and will invalidate the insurance due to interfering with safety features (ie - no airbags), and Van will not have been crash tested by VW with that seat configuration.

We once looked at buying some seat covers that were not airbag tested. Our insurers said that that they would not provide cover if the covers were fitted - partly because of the potential injury claim from a passenger had the airbags fired incorrectly as a result of the seat cover.