Couple of things first: Don't hold me liable for and damages or injuries caused, if you try to replicate some of my ideas;
And: I am working on the seat. The seat has an integrated airbag. Thus, there is the danger that the airbag could be triggered accidentally. The saver way to approach this would be to disconnect the battery after you removed the 6 bolts, which bolt the seat to the chassis (you would need initially that battery power to move the seat back and forward to be able to access those bolts...). Then you could disconnect the battery and hold the 2 cables together (without the battery being involved). I skipped that step, but I am not a good example...

Issue was:
I could not lower the seat anymore with the seat adjust - or as I figured later more precisely: I could not lower the front part of the seat.
Research "told" me that the X-Type has plastic "sprockets" build in into the little motors... Seriously? Yes, seriously! Actually, I was part of the X-Type (X400) design team back them in Coventry in 1998/99. My design responsibility where some switches, mainly the light switch. After all that time I am fairly sure that the nice guy sitting to my left was the one being responsible for the seat design. I think his name was Carl, but I am guessing. Gosh, had I known that he intended to use plastic sprockets to lift the heavy weight of a person, I would have told him off...



To fix this design failure (plastic sprockets) the aftermarket offers the real Mc Coy: Metal sprockets. You can either buy those sprockets only or buy it with the spindle. I bought it with spindle. I bought only the replacement part for the part, which was broken, and that was the 11cm long version. Note that they come in different length. There are lots of different versions of seats (see at the very end of this thread for more details). These gears come - the way I see it currently - for the different versions of X-Type seat in 3 different length: 11, 14 and 16cm.


To avoid having to go thru the immense trouble of having to disconnect the seat belt I simply lifted the driver's seat carefully onto the rear seats with a solid support (little plastic bench underneath). To avoid the endless work of unscrewing those 6 very long fine-threaded bold, which are fixing the seat to the bottom of the car, I used a 10mm socket on an electric battery-power drill. Same with screwing them back on.


To be able to remove the motor, you need to hammer a pin out and remove 2 bolts (5mm hex key),..and: This will drive you nuts: Remove the connector from under the seat. Very tricky: I knew that system, as it is being used in the engine compartment on some Jags: Push a screwdriver thru under the connector to push that little latch away from the connector, so that you can pull the connector off it's "rail". You pull the connector towards the back of the seat... If you want to avoid this trouble, the alternative is to leave the motor connected and you disassemble the motor then and there, while it is still connected.


Here you see 3 motors: on top with thin spindles on both sides: Moving the seat forward and backwards. Below and on right: to move front part of the seat up/down. Below and left: to move rear part of seat up/down. My issue was the front part, which did not want to move down anymore. Note that I am in Australia and this is a RHD driver's seat. Thus, your US driver's seat looks probably like a mirror image of this.


Thus I removed the motor on the right (as seen on picture above). You see the broken (by design) plastic sprocket and the new part on it's right (...the RIGHT part is on the right... . Also note that little plate between the motor and the broken plastic: Do not forget to put it back where it was, i.e. on top of the golden sprocket. The replacement spindle of THIS motor is 11cm long. I am fairly sure that the spindle in the other motor height adjust motor on THIS seat is 14cm long.


Next I moved all the bits and pieces from the old spindle to the new. To do so I had been grinding off the other end of the spindle (opposite to the sprocket). Note that there is a ring inside the outermost part. After moving over all the bits & pieces, the outermost part did not want to go over the new spindle and I carefully drilled a little bit into it with a 9mm drill-bit, but not completely thru - I just removed a tiny bit of material...


... and then I could carefully hammer it into position using a socket.


Next that ring had to go over it as well. I used a massive pair of pliers, bringing first one end of the ring into position, then the middle.


That's it part-assembled...


...and this fully assembled... - so I thought.... I put it back into the seat, mounted the seat into the car, sat in it, and it was awfully rocking a bit forward and backward with the weight of my body. Obviously, something was wrong...:


THIS was WRONG! I left that washer OUTSIDE!


It had to go INSIDE! That little bit of unintended play made for a huge amount of rocking. Btw.: Don't try to drive with the motor removed: The seat will be an absolute rocking chair...


Thus, second assembly (for me): First hammer that pin back in.


That's the pin being in position again.


And here it gets really difficult, because it is very hard to get the little inner bolt into position. Also. you need to adjust the metal bar above to be finally in the correct position over the threads.


That is one idea of how to fit that bolt.


That is another idea of how to fit that bolt (with a "bendy" extension). After having finally fitted the inner little bolt, it's time for the outer bolt - much easier...


Then the connector back on (size 7mm socket).


And a cable tie to hold all those cables together (needed to be cut off before to get the motor off).


And after all this (seat back in position and the fixed motor worked fine), the other height adjust was playing up (the one, which is doing the lifting of the rear of the seat...). I am fairly sure that THIS spindle with sprocket is 14cm long (the other was 11cm).

Which means: I can drive now as it is, but I just ordered the 14cm version of that spindle as well. Obviously, I should have ordered those together with the 11cm spindles - now I have to pay for the postage twice. Lesson learned: Always swap both sprockets or spindles (of both seat-height adjust motors, the 11cm and the 14cm (I think 14cm) version.

Not all X-Type seats look like this one, I also have a manual one, which however still has 1 or 2 motors build in (while the one I was fixing here had 4 motors (there is somewhere another motor to move the backrest, maybe even 2)).

So to sum up the confusion about the different length (and note that I have not yet disassembled the other motors yet, but measuring them with the ruler from the outside made me confident enough to order now actually 2 other versions of this gear: 14cm AND 16cm):

I only looked at the driver seats so far:

I have a 2001 and a 2004 AWD 2.5L X-Type RHD: They both have TWO motors for independent front and rear height adjustment of the seat. One motor has a 11cm spindle and the other one very likely a 14cm spindle.

And I have a 2006 2.1L FWD X-Type RHD: there is only ONE motor for the height adjustment and it seems to be a 16cm spindle (measure from the outside). This one has the same forward/backward motor as the one in the pictures above.

And I have seats only from a 2003 2.5L AWD RHD: That is a "mainly" manual seat, i.e. the forward/backward adjustment happens via the manual lever at the front of the seat and then you push it with your body. I measured the spindle form the outside and I am confident that it is a 16cm spindle.

This shows the a.m. spare seat - mainly manual adjustment with only ONE height adjust motor, which very likely has a 16cm spindle.