Headrest Trouble

[D87 SMW]

As you can see in the image below, the passenger headrest is quite high. This is due to the fact that it cannot be adjusted lower. On removing the headrest completely, I found that there was a piece of the plastic holder broken off and stuck down inside the seat. Does anyone know a way of fishing a piece of plastic from the inside of the seat?

[Austin-Rover]

Ditto with my car. I am not quite sure what it is thats blocking the tube the headrest slots into, but it can be jiggled about, but cant be moved out of the way to get the headrest in.

[F690OTF(RIP)]

We had the same problem with our previous Maestro. As F170GGT suggests, the piece of plastic floating around is basically the bottom half of the tube into which the headrest goes. This can then move around enough that the two parts of the tube don't line up correctly and so you can't push the headrest down below the point at which the 'prong' of the headrest is attempting to exit the top half of the tube, but is of course blocked by the broken second half. Helpfully, I can't remember how I did it, but with some careful jiggery-pokery I managed to get the two bits lined up so I could push the headrest down. This done, the trick is merely never to pull the headrest up out of the bottom half of the tube again! Obviously a permanent fix is more desirable, especially if you are likely to want to remove the headrest with any regularity. The problem is that it involves dismantling the seat moderately thoroughly.

Yes, some of it's coming back to me now, I think. If it's broken where ours did, you can extract the top half of the tube (although I suppose socket might be a better term), but the bottom half is still locked in. I think it must come out backwards or downwards when you have the seat dismantled. I think that's what I managed to do, and it is then easier to line the bottom half up. So far as we could tell, such damage occurred when people used the headrest 'prongs' as grab handles of some sort.

I may be completely mis-remembering a lot of this, so don't absolutely rely on what I've said. Just poke around and see what you can find.

Hope this is of some help,

Peter

[MaestroMatt]

This happened on both the 1.3s I owned - the best advice you can give to anyone with a Maestro with the metal-pronged headrests is never, ever, ever pull them out! To get them back in, you will have to use a thin piece of wire (bent paper clip sort opf thing) to align the broken tube (which is exactly as Peter describes) with the prong you are to shove down it - after about 50 tries and a bit of luck, you will get it back in there. For reasons I can't fathom, the broken piece of tube inside the seat just will not stay central under any circumstances. The whole affair is best conducted from the back seat.

[John]

Would it be worth putting a point on the prongs so they force the tube into alignment as the point enters.
Just a thought

[F690OTF(RIP)]

There already is one, it's just that the bottom bit moves too much. You could try some kind of clever setup with a magnet, but this would involve getting access to the bottom half, which is half the problem in the first place.