Another "small" project...

Last year, when it got summer, I decided I could not live with the leather seats in my Vantage - they were just too sweaty, even on short drives.

So I installed a seat ventillation...
I hired a saddler to do the changes on the surface, to keep the quality of the cabin high.

Myself I did the tech stuff underneath:
- selecting blowers (radials for high pressure drop)
- decided where to put them
- made channels to get the air distributed
- and did all the installations..

Due to the constraints given by the seat design, the job was tougher than expected...
thats where the 2 blowers finally sit:
in the upright



underneath the bottom:




To distribute the air (essential for comfort) the air now enters a chamber in the back of the foam.
Inside the chamber there's a special spacer net/grid, allowing for air distribution across.




from there, lots of holes feed the air to the front side of the foam




The re-fitting of the heating was quite tedious...

However, thats all you see now (air entry in the backrest with a net):





and the button to switch it on (the circle illuminates blue as indicator...):




and of course one sees the front,
where we kept the the original design language, just now with perforated alcantara.




Also I installed a 3-stage adjuster on the lower end of the seat (aside the handbreak lever), where the airflow can be regulated.
Basically one needs 2 possibilities, strong flow for cooling when you enter the car, and a very small flow for long journeys.
It's quite amazing, how little of airflow is sufficient to avoid this uncomfortable humid environment, which makes one sweat otherwise.

As one can imagine, it was lot's of work.
Was it worth it? Definitely yes!
Makes me really looking ahead to the next nice warm summer...

Thomas

 

That's an awesome little project.

Nice neat job !!

 

 

Very nice indeed, thanks for sharing

 

EXCELLENT project! You could certainly market that here in south FL.

 

Love this! I wonder if someone could take what you have done and replicate easily enough???

 

Awesome. Did your seats originally have that Alcantara-like material or were they full leather?

 

Well done! You could have just used the seat "heater" switch since that function essentially doesn't work, at least on my Vantage...

 

Thanks for the kind words.

I think to market something like that is difficult, as it will be rather expensive if done properly.
There is a considerable amount of engineering necessary to generate a solution, and the solution will be different for different seats in different cars.
I doubt one finds many customers willing to pay you for the real hours...

Any talented saddler should be able to do something similar (and I mean a skilled craftsman/artisan, not some guy who puts prefabricated stuff over old seats).
Working on the basis of my pictures will give quite some advantage - I did not know how the seats look underneath when I started...

 

Very impressive Thomas, been needed for some time now. It would be great to see a kit put together.

Regards,

 

 

They were full leather.

...my heating still works - on both stages...

On a funny sidenote, when dismantling the seats we discovered that the botton heating is quite a ****-up (design fault).
The heating sheet doess not really fit the seat, which is why the heating extends around the front corner below ones knees all the way down where never any leg touches,
and as countereffect doesnt heat ones bum (left hand side gap)...
Thermal image of how the heat wire is positioned on the staock seat:

 

Were ventilated seats ever offered as a factory option on the Vantage? The Rapide is the only one I normally see has them. They don't work that good on the Rapide. I feel the motor spinning more than I feel the cooling. On our Jag, the cooling nearly pushes you off the seat!

 

That's surely the difference between a good design and a poor one.
A seat ventillation is a rather complex engineering task to solve - which makes it an expensive development (and also, but to a lesser degree, an expensive installation).

 

Impressive