The evo trunk space is sad. It's shallow, and not very useable. I therefore decided to put some Ralliart rear folding seats in there which certainly made it a lot more useable. This is how I did it.

For the seat base, there is no difference, just snap in and go. The upright portion is where there is work to do.

First thing is to remove the old seat, the battery, washer tank, and cross braces - you can actually retain the braces but it kind of defeats the purpose of a big pass through. It would also be possible to retain the washer tank and battery in their current locations as well, but this would make the folding seats only useful for skis or other long thin items.

It turns out the outer seat hinges already have captive nuts welded in under the sheet metal that covers the rails. If you drill through the top layer using a template made from the parts car, it's right there. The inner hinges however are more challenging, and will require welding and fabrication. I suppose it is possible they also have hidden captive nuts under the top layer, but this would require cutting out the cross brace bracket which I wanted to retain.

The top latch hooks have the holes pre drilled, but do not have any captive nuts. There are many points with which to access a wrench from behind though to add nuts. There is a part of the keyless entry system hanging from the top brace, this should also be removed and relocated nearby.

I used the early style rear seats that have separate sides, and found the existing hooks from the evo seats fit these perfectly as does the lower bolt. I wouldn't expect much difference if using the one piece later seats. The center seat hook from the evo seat does need to be removed or bent out of the way. With that the seats are mounted, and you can move on to relocating the items that use to live behind them.





Captive nut hidden under top layer





I opted to move the battery to the right and washer to the left as this would require the least amount of extention of wires etc. The battery tray can be bolted in from below above the ayc pump quite easily. Drill holes and good. The washer tank I made a lower bracket from another evo, and a top bracket that bolts to the subwoofer top mount. Lines and wires for both still did need to be extended but not by much.

Trunk lining and carpeting was a mix of evo and Ralliart because that's what I had on hand. Some of it had to be heat gunned to conform to the slightly different shapes of the pass-through arch. Carpeting and underfloor foam is all Ralliart, again some need to be cut and modified to fit.

I also moved the sub to the right side with a bunch of custom bracketey, though it could still work on the left. This just fit a little tighter for my setup and I had already extended the wires.









Overall not that hard, and even with the battery and washer on the sides there is much more useable space even with the seats up.

 

Hi,

Really great tutorial. Please can you provide more insight into how you disconnected the washer tank without liquid going everywhere and what you did/needed to get it fitted correctly to the new location?
Please can you share details on how you extended the battery wires too?

Thanks!