How To Manually Move A Power Seat 6 Options Helpful Tips

If your vehicle has a weak or dead battery, wikiHow can help you jump start or replace the battery.

Your vehicle’s tool kit is usually stashed along with other emergency repair items like the spare tire and jack. Check your owner’s manual for specific information. [5] X Research source If you don’t have a winder tool, try searching for one online—unfortunately, they’re harder to track down than you’d think. Additionally, winder tools aren’t universal and may not work with your particular power seat motor.

Just to throw in a little more of a complication here, your power seat may have multiple motors, each of which controls different aspects of the motor’s movement. Unless your owner’s manual walks you through the process, you’re pretty much stuck having to find each motor and figure out through trial-and-error what adjustments it makes to the seat. You’ll need a flashlight—and don’t be surprised if you find some loose change and ancient fast food crumbs down there!

If only one side of the chair is moving forward or backward, there are probably two separate motors that need to be manually adjusted. Look for a second motor opposite to the one you’re working on. Once you find it, alternate between motor sockets, moving the chair a little bit at a time with each one. There’s a good chance you’ll only be able to move the seat forward or back with a winder tool—not up or down, etc.

Running the drill slowly also reduces the likelihood of stripping out the socket. If there are two motors that control forward/back movement, go back and forth between them regularly with the drill to keep the seat from going crooked and getting stuck on the track. Keep in mind that, while it’s possible this method will work just as well (and maybe faster) than the winder tool, it’s not the method you’ll find recommended in any owner’s manual. The winder tool is designed for this job, while a power drill is not.

Keep in mind that you may do further damage to the power seat’s motor and mechanism this way. Eventually (or maybe immediately), the system will fully break down and you’ll have to rely on another method.

In this case, there’s a good chance you’ll damage the seat mechanism.

Find the wire bundle running to the seat motor, cut it, and strip away the coating on the end of the wires inside. Clamp or splice lengths of coated wire to the two thickest wires inside the bundle. Connect the other ends of the wires to the positive and negative terminals of a battery, such as a battery pack with lead wires or a cordless tool battery. If the motor is good, the seat will start to move (switch terminals with the wires if the seat is moving in the wrong direction).

To reach the four bolts (one at each corner) that hold the seat in place, you have to move the seat fully forward and fully back. But this isn’t easy to do when the power seat mechanism isn’t working! So you end up having to temporarily solve the problem to (maybe) have a chance at permanently solving it.
There are a lot of wires and multiple motors under a power seat, especially in a modern vehicle. Unless you’re very confident in your wiring skills, strongly consider leaving this job to the professionals at an auto garage. If you decide that this repair is beyond your skills, figure on paying somewhere around $800 USD to have your power seat repaired professionally.