Rikard Moseng
New Member
Hello!
The 60 side of our 60/40 split power 3rd row seat in our 2011 Expedition MAX/EL is currently broken.
If you have two people and about 15 minutes, you can constantly wiggling the seat while pressing the up or down button to get the worm gear to turn. The motor does turn on, but the drive shaft that goes out to the worm gear/screw does not turn. After disassembling the back trim, we narrowed the fault down to a stripped gear inside the motor itself. You can actually use a cordless drill with a square driver in the far side of the motor to get the seat up and down, so I'm assuming the plastic gears inside the motor are stripped and that part of the motor that the driver turns just directly connects to the drive shaft.
After a LOT of googling, it appears that this is actually a pretty rare problem. The wiring, etc, is all fine, just the motor is malfunctioning. It also appears to be really difficult to access the motor to replace it, not to mention that the part itself seems pretty rare.
It occurred to me recently that just replacing the whole seat would actually be much easier than trying to replace the seat motor. That seat has an ugly but purely cosmetic tear in it from before we owned the rig, so a "new" intact seat would be an added plus. I have located several possible replacements at a junkyard near me, thus saving on shipping compared to buying one on Ebay. I'd also rather not go back to the dealer to fix this issue. I'm seeing serious $$$ associated with that route.
Is replacing the whole seat assembly a reasonable solution to this problem? Has anybody ever seen this issue before?
The 60 side of our 60/40 split power 3rd row seat in our 2011 Expedition MAX/EL is currently broken.
If you have two people and about 15 minutes, you can constantly wiggling the seat while pressing the up or down button to get the worm gear to turn. The motor does turn on, but the drive shaft that goes out to the worm gear/screw does not turn. After disassembling the back trim, we narrowed the fault down to a stripped gear inside the motor itself. You can actually use a cordless drill with a square driver in the far side of the motor to get the seat up and down, so I'm assuming the plastic gears inside the motor are stripped and that part of the motor that the driver turns just directly connects to the drive shaft.
After a LOT of googling, it appears that this is actually a pretty rare problem. The wiring, etc, is all fine, just the motor is malfunctioning. It also appears to be really difficult to access the motor to replace it, not to mention that the part itself seems pretty rare.
It occurred to me recently that just replacing the whole seat would actually be much easier than trying to replace the seat motor. That seat has an ugly but purely cosmetic tear in it from before we owned the rig, so a "new" intact seat would be an added plus. I have located several possible replacements at a junkyard near me, thus saving on shipping compared to buying one on Ebay. I'd also rather not go back to the dealer to fix this issue. I'm seeing serious $$$ associated with that route.
Is replacing the whole seat assembly a reasonable solution to this problem? Has anybody ever seen this issue before?
