Home > Upgrades and Enhancements > Interior > Leather Seats

Leather Seat Install

Question:	"My butt is cold, husband."
Answer:	"Turn on the seat heater, woman."

Level of Difficulty:

Easy

Time:

1 hour

Intro:

Cloth seats are nice when new. They are nice and fuzzy, feel good against bare skin, and are generally are pretty nifty. A few years go by, and those nice, new fuzzy seats are stained, scratchy and pretty stinky. The alternative? Leather, baby.

4000 and Coupe models came with leather on the higher-end models. They even came in nice colors like black and red, not some washed-out brownish-tan like you'll find in most high-end Japanese and American autos. If you can locate some leather for your car, grab it.

Leather is just nice. Cool to the skin in summer, firmer and nicer to sit on, leather is just generally better. Besides, it's sexy as hell. The way it shines in the sun, and smells all manly when you're on a date is sure to get everyone to love you. Or so you think.

I grabbed a new black leather set for my car for around 400 USD, and was generally happy with the condition of the leather. I got the complete set, consisting of: Front and Rear seats, door panels, and underdash pod. The pod contains that little shelf that I use for cd storage, and has the little embedded heater controls in it. Since I had the heated version of the seats, I figured it would be nice to use that feature.

Tools/Parts needed:

Flatheaded screwdriver (for prying)

Install

Take out your old seats
Clean up all your old trash. You'll be amazed by what you find underneath your seats.
Lube the tracks with some heavy grease, but not a lot, because it will get everywhere.
Replace all the seat hardware: springs, plastic plug, and metal arm (if applicable)

Applicable for heated seats

Lay down heated harness under rug.

Remove underdash pod
Unscrew interior rug edge. Strip of metal running right next to the door on the inside floor.
Attach brown plug to a good ground, and the red plug to pin 30-something.
Lay harness under rug and over hump in the middle.

Reinstall seats

Take out black stopper at rear end of track, embedded in the floor.
Position seat so that one side is in track, and then push forward and the seat should slide in.
Pull back black metal rod from front of seat mount. It's the thing attached to the springs you replaced.
Slide seat up until you can push the slider with the holes in it, attached to the bottom of the seat, forward through the little gap in the metal.
Push rod back through hole in seat. This is how you adjust your seat, by yanking on the handle that is attached to the rod, that frees the seat up to move back and forth.

Plug harness into seat plugs.
Warm Butt.

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Page last updated: April 28, 2003