Bongo Fury

Hi. Does anyone have any experience, good or bad of the middle swivel seat by Northstar Conversions who are based in Cowes on the IoW?

The only thing I'd say is that I decided I quite fancy this in my Bongo. They have a post on their web page saying if you're having any work done they'll lend you a van to explore the island while they did it. I thought this sounded great so I contacted them several times and didn't get a response.

They got back to me quickly asking for details of the upholstery etc. but it’s a long way to travel and a costly boat trip without having seen one “in the flesh”.

Any idea of the cost of getting them to put these in?

It was £400 when I was checking. That was a year or so ago IIRC.

My advice to anyone about the swivel rear seat is if you don't need a forward facing seat for child seats etc just keep the original seat permanently reversed. The seat is good if you need to have if forward facing when moving but the downsides are-
You loose a bit of storage space underneath the seat due to the mechanism, there's about enough room to slide a laptop under.
Its a swivel mount that's designed for a single seat but fitted in the middle of the bench seat so it can feel a bit wobbly.
It can be quite noisy/clunky when traveling, especially if the seat is unoccupied.
Yes you have to take the rear boxes out to allow it to swivel, I just line mine with those Ikea bags so you can just lift everything out in one go.
Lifting the boxes out is not a big problem as such but when the van is fully loaded up with camping gear it can be more of a pain.

To sum up, if I didn't need to have the swivel seat due to needing 3 point belt for child seats I wouldn't have it.