Yummy! It took us a while but finally got enough cash to buy some carpet to line the sides of the Van – ebay is the best place to get this from – juts search for T4 carpet Lining Kit and you’ll find a good guy called T4_world he does them in all different colours and it comes delivered with loads of spray glue too – so a real bargain!
Anyway – here’s the pics – you don’t really need instructions, common sense really! Just make sure you have a good Stanley knife!
Sorry for there being such a gap in between buying those Saab Seats and actually telling you how to fit them! Guess I just got lazy writing these blogs, or guess we’ve just been too busy messing with the Van and the new baby Corrado (Jeff to his friends!)
Anyway, there are two ways you can fit a Saab Seat to a T4 and which way you do it depends what year your T4 is. Basically pre ’96 Vans have a seat base that takes a Saab seat like a treat – you just need to take your old seat off, drill two extra holes and you’re in business. However, if you have a newer Van, then you’re in for a little more work! Just to make it hard for ourselves, we did it both ways! We got out mitts on one Pre- ’96 base which until I wrote my post below about 96 seat bases were going for about £25 and after I wrote it were going for £45+! Suppose I should have kept my mouth shut until I’d got one, but hey, at least loads of other T4′ers have got on with some top Saab mods!
So one seat base was the pre ’96 one and the other was the original one out of our Van, which is an 03 reg.
Here’s how we did it:
fitting a Saab Seat to Pre 96 Base: It is simply a case of sitting the seat on the base – marking where the holes in the runners are – they should be about 2.5mm wider than the existing holes. Mark, then drill, then bolt on – takes about 10 mins with a good drill bit!
Fitting Saab Seats to a post ’96 Seat Base: This takes longer and you’ll need to get your hands on two fabricated steel plates about 3mm thick. You need to drill through them and bolt them on to the original runner holes in the seat base. You’re doing this to make the seat base wider – because the runners on the Saab seats are about 2.5mm wider than the seat base 
EXCUSE THE ORDER OF PICTURES – AS SOON AS YOU GET TO THE ONES WHERE THE METAL PLATES ARE ON THE BASE YOU’RE LOOKING AT HOW TO FIT ON TO A POST 96 BASE, I JUST CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO SPLIT THEM!
We bagged this baby today 
The 2nd addition to our V Dub family!
This will be a quick one! Luckily we know a top guy who fits carpets – John Evans, know him since school so we knew if there was one thing we were going to get bang on with this conversion, it was the carpet! John put us some £14 a meter soundproof and insulation AND some cloud nine insulation, then a hard wearing cord carpet. The result – heaven on your feet! it has raised the floor by about 1inch! Also got some off-cut of carpet and insulation from John, so are going to carpet the wheel arches this weekend I’ve been told by a T4 camper conversion specialist that doing that will drasticlly reduce the sound from the outside travelling in – perfect!
Check out these pictures of the new carpet in the T4:
We we’re a little lucky as when we bought our van, all but the barn door and the sliding door were already ply lined. I must say I was pleased about this as when we were looking for the van I was looking at how much ply line kits were to just buy – on ebay they can go for anything from £45 (second hand and a bit decked in) t0 £185 (0obviously a rip off seen as though a sheet of ply from BnQ is about £11.00.
The other problem is cutting the templates out. Now we’re lucky as Alex has got a table saw and a jigsaw and it good with stuff like that, so he was able to measure up the barn and sliding door and cut the ply out for it. If you buy your van and it isn’t ply lined, then you either have the job of measuring up yourself and hoping for a few flukey cuts, or investing some cash in to a pre-cut one from ebay – either way it is a job that just has to be done as this is where you insulate the van.
Here’s a few pics of inside the van – you’ll see our ply lining is white – flashy hey lol!
Once you have all your ply lining sorted then you need to insulate the Van, so it is warm when you’re living in it (which we might be if the bloody recession continues!).
There a loads of different insulations, but Alex just nipped to BnQ when they were BOGOF – so it was 150mm loft insulation made from recycled plastic so it doesn’t give off those nasty spaws that irritate the skin. It turned out to be a good choice and not only really noticeably insulates the van, but also reduces the sound too – so we no longer have to shout to each other when we’re driving – we can actually hear properly now!
A small note to mention about insulating – we wanted to insulate the roof too. However, 150mm is too thick and it makes the roof droop and it just isn’t strong enough to hold it. So we’re going to get some of that foil backed bubble wrap insulation. You can pick it up for £11.00 a roll from screw fix, whereas BnQ will try to take £30.00 off you for exactly the same thing!
We always measure DYI prices against Screwfix as they are usually cheaper on everything!
It took Alex about a day to fit the insulation because he had a bit of trouble drilling off the rivets because he kept cutting himself on the burrs of the rivets as they kept getting stuck on the drill bit so he had to pull them off – i think he had a cut on every finger on his right hand! But it was worth it!
So instead of posting some info I actually need some help! We’re looking to replace the steel standard wheels on the T4 with some alloys. The problem: we know nothing about alloys! After a bit of research I think I’m safe in saying that the T4 wheels need studs that are 112mm from the center, but apart from that I’m not sure – there is a bit more info I have found here http://tinyurl.com/djlzk4, but if anyone can make sense of it for me I’d appreciate it!
final plea for help – anyone ever fitted porsche alloys to their T4???!!!
This will be their home until I figure out how to fit the damn things!
Don't get excited - it is only balanced on there at the moment!
There is loads of helpful info from Clive on his blog here http://www.windowsmediapc.co.uk/t4/
Enjoy!
So after a 7 hour journey to Wolverhampton and back – when it should take 3 hours (bloody M6 closed!), we got the Saab seats. They look ace … although they are not in the van yet! We read up on as many forums as we could about which seats fit – the main aim to be the ones that look the best and fit the easiest (yeh right!), but to be honest there isn’t a great deal of stuff out there – and when I say that, I mean real, to the point instructions and advice. The majority of stuff I came across said that Saab seats fit …. well ours are Saab 9-5 seats, and they DON’T FIT!!!
But all is not lost! In a fit of despair I went on a major hunt for info and found this on the T4 Forum
simply drill 4 holes and bolt down.
haven’t done mine yet as i am a still waiting for my other base to turn up as i only have 1 at the moment but am 99.9% sure it is going to work.
Not as straight forward as I thought it was gonna be.
Got old seat out in mins… Measured up the difference in runner width between the 2 types of seats.
Saab runners were 25mm wider.
So, 2x plates from some Steel strip, holes 25mm apart and that was that sorted.
The only other problem was that 1x of the Saab runners, is shorter than the other.
The longer one I managed to get on fine (by keeping the plates I made loose til I bolted the seat to them, then tightening them up. (it was only about 4mm out length wise to the VW base seat mounts.
The other side required a hole drilling into the VW base, futher back towards the rear, this allowed the shorter runner to mount the base. (Put some thick washers between the seat, and base to allow for the plate thickness on the other side
So, only the rear, inner mount was re-used, as the other x3 required some modding.
Now to the biggest headache!!
I guess its at this point I should confess to my T4 being a ‘Van’ and therefore I have fitted a full bulkhead to keep the noisedown, and the warmth into the cab.
From all the research I did on this site, I never came across anyone who has fitted the Saab seats, AND had a full bulkhead. Now I know why!!!
The seat is in there, and all bolted down, but I can’t quite get the seat back far enough for me to be 100% comfortable. I am prob 5’10 at a guess, and quite like to have my seat back, laid back a little, so as I am not too ‘upright’.
The bulkhead is restricting the room so I guess I am gonna have to come up with a way of dropping the Bulkhead back and inch or 2. Currently the headrest is pushing against the bulkhead as hard as possible, and that’s the best I can get it.
So, just a friendly reminder, If you have a Bulkhead fitted, think things through carefully, as it needs to be taken into consideration when changing seats etc…
Ps…… I only fitted the Passenger side seat, to the drivers side, ( I swapped the seatbelt clasp over (kept the Saab one, it works with the VW belt), as I want to keep the ‘Bench’ seat for passengers.
If you’re not a memeber on the T4 forum it is well worth taking a few minutes to sign up – there is some good advice on there and loads of people who are going through the same mods as you will be – so you could save yourself some time!
…. Thanks to the top guy who posted this – we are now on the hunt for Pre 96 seat bases! Come on!
Pictures of the Saab Seats coming soon!
So me and Alex have always wanted a campervan. I think we first picked up the fever at the 2003 VW festival in Cornwall. They’re held every August Bank holiday down there and since our first visit, we were hooked. We knew we wanted a V Dub, we just never thought we could get one. I don’t know why, I guess we thought they were really expensive (which of course – some are), but other than that I guess it was a lifestyle we thought was somehow, strangely out of our reach – looking back it was probably because we didn’t know enough about where to start or how to get involved.
The thing that tipped us over the edge was our mate Ross. he bought a Type 25 air cooled camper off ebay about 2 years ago – he was a right jammy bugger and bought it for pennies, ran it for a summer (and apart from him having to put a new fuel tank in it -typical Type 25), he then sold it on for a small wedge of profit! Even though he only had it for a summer – we were severely bitten by the camper bug.
But it took us until now to get our mitts on our own van! Why – well we’re kind of like kids chasing a football, we want to do loads of things all at the same time, and if I have anything to do with it, we have to do them all immediately! So I wanted a new car – I got a pay rise and got one, a year later, Alex fell in love with the idea of a BMW, so we sold his clio to his brother got ourselves a loan and bang – he had a Beema! But nothing ever replaced the idea of a camper and when ross got his second camper (another T25!), we knew what we had to do!
Our problem: We are always skint! So they only way we could get one was to sell the beloved Beema! But that would mean we needed something realiable as the van would be alex’s day to day veichle – so we had to go for the T4!
So us being us, we went to see our first T4, it was in Wakefield, Yorkshire at Work and Leisure Vehicles (I’ll talk more about how good these guys are later). It was a white panel van, ply lined inside, but that’s about it. But the best bits – well full serv history, one owner and a lifting tail gate! Well in a nutshell, we saw it, we put a deposit down on it and gave ourselves the challenge of selling the BMW in 3 weeks – or we lose the van and the deposit! (nightmare!)
I thought all was lost until on the last day of the 3 weeks, I sold the BMW!! So it was meant to be – the T4 was ours!!
1 week from the best buy of our lives !! we’ve got conversion fever – and the first part of the mod is going to happen tomorrow – we’re picking up some black leather Saab front seats that we got on ebay- heated but manual! perfect!
…The only problem, a) we don’t know if they will fit and b) if they do we’re not sure we know how to fit them! If anyone has any tips – please shout!
