MarkVIIIEnjoyer
Newbie
- Joined
- May 11, 2025
- Messages
- 5
- Location
- Western Pennsylvania
- Vehicle Details
- 1993 Lincoln Mark VIII with a very finicky 4.6L 4V
I have a 1993 Lincoln Mark VIII and I had found myself in a strange scenario, as while I was reaching into the backseat for something I folded my driver seat forwards. The automatic slide forward pushed the seat right on forward, but would not retreat backwards, making the seat effectively stuck all the way forwards.
This is quite the predicament as I'm by no means short at 6'5, so I definitely needed the seat as far back as possible to comfortably drive. I had remembered that folks have dropped Mark VIII seats in Thunderbirds and figured "may as well reverse it".
This guide details installing the 89-93 cloth seats from a Thunderbird or Cougar, not the super coupe seats. I found the whole set (fronts and rears) at a local Upullnpay for an even 100 dollars. I recommend taking the wire past the connector that goes into the floor of the source car, as it gives you extra length to splice onto and allows you to just splice the connector instead of having to lay the whole seat in and splice that.
On your newly acquired seats, there are two sets of wires. One has a brown connector, the other grey. The brown connector activates the automatic slide forward, which I did not connect in order to avoid having a similar situation occur again. The other two wires are Black with a white stripe and a pure black. The B/W is your positive and the pure Black is your negative. These power all the other seat functions your new seat has.
Now that we've identified the pos/neg of the new seats, we must find a suitable power wire from the Mark VIII harness. And I won't even lie, these things are a complicated mess. The skinny black rectangular connector is of no concern, as it only powers the memory seats modules that the Mark VIII had.
What we are interested in is the square plug that powered the motors in the old seats. Probing the prongs shows multiple power sources, namely the Orange wire and the Black and White wire. To keep things orderly, I simply spliced the two aforementioned B/W wires together. Your ground wire is the thicker gauge solid black wire. Connect them to your two seat wires and you've only got the fasten the seat to the car and you've got an installed front seat!
As for the rear seat, it swaps in just like the old ones do. I'm sure someone has written a better guide for that in relation to removing them for replacing a fuel pump.
I'm satisfied with how the project turned out and my only real gripe is that the front seatbelts are at a slightly different angle now due to how the 89-93 models had the active restraint style seatbelts, but it's overall no big deal.
This is quite the predicament as I'm by no means short at 6'5, so I definitely needed the seat as far back as possible to comfortably drive. I had remembered that folks have dropped Mark VIII seats in Thunderbirds and figured "may as well reverse it".
This guide details installing the 89-93 cloth seats from a Thunderbird or Cougar, not the super coupe seats. I found the whole set (fronts and rears) at a local Upullnpay for an even 100 dollars. I recommend taking the wire past the connector that goes into the floor of the source car, as it gives you extra length to splice onto and allows you to just splice the connector instead of having to lay the whole seat in and splice that.
On your newly acquired seats, there are two sets of wires. One has a brown connector, the other grey. The brown connector activates the automatic slide forward, which I did not connect in order to avoid having a similar situation occur again. The other two wires are Black with a white stripe and a pure black. The B/W is your positive and the pure Black is your negative. These power all the other seat functions your new seat has.
Now that we've identified the pos/neg of the new seats, we must find a suitable power wire from the Mark VIII harness. And I won't even lie, these things are a complicated mess. The skinny black rectangular connector is of no concern, as it only powers the memory seats modules that the Mark VIII had.
What we are interested in is the square plug that powered the motors in the old seats. Probing the prongs shows multiple power sources, namely the Orange wire and the Black and White wire. To keep things orderly, I simply spliced the two aforementioned B/W wires together. Your ground wire is the thicker gauge solid black wire. Connect them to your two seat wires and you've only got the fasten the seat to the car and you've got an installed front seat!
As for the rear seat, it swaps in just like the old ones do. I'm sure someone has written a better guide for that in relation to removing them for replacing a fuel pump.
I'm satisfied with how the project turned out and my only real gripe is that the front seatbelts are at a slightly different angle now due to how the 89-93 models had the active restraint style seatbelts, but it's overall no big deal.
