I swapped a Yukon bench into my Yukon XL over a year ago and thought some here would be interested in the swap. As most of you know, it does not bolt it as the LWB and SWB have different floors and mounting patterns. This was more of a cut, weld, grind, fab and then bolt-in swap. This was '02 Yukon Denali bench into '05 XL that had buckets. I did this because I couldn't find an XL/Sub bench outright for less than $800 and ended up finding the SWB bench in good shape for $50 (and I'm a sucker for deals & projects).
Goals:
-Modify the bench seat only, no mods to the truck and no permanent changes to the buckets
-Ability to back out and return everything to stock with just wrenches
-Ability to swap between bench and bucket whenever in a reasonable amount of time
Passenger side:
-I kept the XL seat base, to preserve the slide-forward feature. This requires using the whole seat back hinge mechanism.
-The bottom "flip-up" part of the seat is the same on both, so it swaps with just the two hinge bolts and latches the same. This concludes the "easy peasey" portion of the swap
-The seat backs have different hinges, but they do bolt on the same. The leather can be disconnected at the base of the seat back to access these 3 bolts, although the top one on the outside is hard to reach.
-I had to fabricate a "cam" type thingy to fit into the seatbelt side of the hinge. This actuates a pin that allows the seat back to flip forward or keeps it locked in place (IIRC).
Driver side:
-The bucket was removed whole and the entire SWB bench frame was used. This preserves all folding and adjustment functions without any fabrication
-The rear mounting points were cut off and new ones mounted lower and in slightly different locations. This bench half now uses 3 of the stock bucket attachment points. The RR is not used. Instead, the RR of the bench is now shared with the LR of the passenger side seat.
-For center seatbelt attachment, a bracket was fabricated to attach to the (now) unused RR mount for the left bucket seat. This is a few inches tall, to account for the difference in floor heights.
I should mention that I did not use the fold-down "gap filler" panels at all for this.
I ran the bench setup for a little more than a rear and recently switched back. The swap took me a little over an hour with air tools, so it wasn't the breeze I was hoping for, but acceptable to do once or twice a year.
So there you have it - some say "it can't be done". I say "it can, but you probably won't think it's worth it."