After the refurbishment of the driver’s seat, I needed to find a way to make the armrest work, again. It appears to be a problem with all armrests in these vans. Vauxhall, Renault and Nissan, all chose a tragically bad mechanism to support the arm.
March ‘2023:
I managed to remove the arm from the seat. It’s all about putting it in line and squeezing the two prongs on either side of the boss. It was a trick to do. At this point, the armrest would sit on my workside, waiting to be investigated.
April ‘2023:
I began by cutting the cover, a little way up, then scraping the foam off of it. This was tricky, with it being VERY well stuck to the plastic. The screws used a TORX system in five places. This also helped to break some of the foam that was still stuck.
Inside, I found an array of parts, with the plastic ring having broken at some time in the past several years. Removing the ring and its broken parts, I came to the conlcusion that the metal ring should stay in place.
I settled on a part that I named, the Stop-Ring. This was designed to sit on top of the original, metal, ring.
Version One: This was designed to stop the armrest either up or down. The print went well, but broke under the weight of my arm. It also struggled to slide, completely, onto the boss. I needed to plan a second version.
Version Two: I added an extra down-piece. This was to keep the Stop-Ring in place. If it couldn’t move, it shouldn’t sheer off.
At this point, I am planning Version Three. It is now down to a choice of whether I should remove all of the pieces and start from scratch, or keep trying the Stop-Ring idea.
If I choose to remove all of the gubbins, I will have to create a solid ring, instead of it sitting atop of another. If it’s the Stop-Ring idea, then this will have to be made out of another material. The larger, singular-ring, will still be a Stop-Ring, but not in conjunction with other parts, so it is not entirely the same idea.
What will it be? This is…TO BE CONTINUED!
