Anyone replaced seat airbag?

Flyboy152

toastydave wrote: »

There is no magic to airbags, they are just a well packed bag with a Cordite charge, ignited by a electric fuse,

The fuse is just two wires (one is the live, one the return and earth), the system works by passing a current through the fuse, which then gets hot and sets off the cordite.

once the fuse has got hot, it will break the continuity of the two wires, and the airbag unit will know the bag has been fired.

Now onto to the myths I have read here

The current required to set of an airbag is in the region of 20mA, so 0.02Amps! No chance of burning the connectors on deployment.

There is no chance the airbag from the original seat could self deploy as you need the Airbag computer to send the electrical charge to set it off.

We know the new airbag has been fitted to a working state because,

A. it did not go off on battery reconnection

B. the Air bag ECU will check the connections at startup


The only danger I can see here could be physical damage to the seat, but if that checks out, it all good

mikey72 wrote: »

I always though it was a chemical reaction, the ecu sets off a gas generator, that inflates the bag.

I always thought it was only the seat belt pretensioners that used a cordite charge. Having a cordite generated explosion, directly in front of your face, doesn't sound very pleasant.

mikey72

Flyboy152 wrote: »

I always thought it was only the seat belt pretensioners that used a cordite charge. Having a cordite generated explosion, directly in front of your face, doesn't sound very pleasant.

I thought cordite ceased production years ago. Seat belt pre tensioners use a sealed gas cartidge that's ignited, to produce the tensioning.

Flyboy152

mikey72 wrote: »

I thought cordite ceased production years ago. Seat belt pre tensioners use a sealed gas cartidge that's ignited, to produce the tensioning.

Hmmm....not so sure, but I am led to believe that they are still considered to be class one explosives.

toastydave

Different air bags may use different propellent, but nearly all are explosive and use the above method of detonation.

All an explosion does is create rapidly expanding gas, its quite easy to calculate the size of explosive required to fill a certain size of bag with gas.

cyclonebri1

For anyone in doubt of the power released when an airbag deploys, in the 1st 10 years after drivers airbags came into use in america, 40 pipe smoking drivers were killed when the airbag went off, , takes some swallowing

shaun_from_Africa

All an explosion does is create rapidly expanding gas, its quite easy to calculate the size of explosive required to fill a certain size of bag with gas

.

Spot on.
Any explosion is simply one or more chemicals burning, and the faster they burn, the bigger the explosion.
Passenger masks on aircraft use oxygen produced by chemicals burning slowly. A faster burn rate will simply produce gas a a greater rate and will be called an explosion.

Having a cordite generated explosion, directly in front of your face, doesn't sound very pleasant.

I don't know about the cordite, but with a steering wheel or dash mounted airbag, an explosion directly in front of your face is exactly what you are getting

Oussaiden

chrisw wrote: »

Done it now thanks. I cut round the airbag on the old seat and there is a piece of trim the other side of the material which it clips into, sandwiching the material, which is edged with plastic round the opening. Unfortunately there was no way of releasing the tags from the outside so I had to release some of the seat cover on the new seat to get at the tags from behind. The new 'pod' then just clipped into the trim and bolted back on to the seat frame. I refastened the cover using cable ties rather than using the old metal clips.
Seems to be ok as the airbag light has now gone out.

How did u get the pod separated from the material I'm having the same problem I cut the new air bag pod out of seat but can't work out how to spectate it from material