Not only do they look nice, the electric controls make them infinitely adjustable and they are incredibly comfortable
You may even be lucky and obtain a set with working seat heaters although they fail quickly and it is therefore unusual to find them in working order. The passenger seat is more likely to have a woring heater.
The following points should be noted before thinking about the swap:
1. Seats from an S2 vehicle will fit an S1 vehicle with provisos.
2. Seats from an S1 vehicle strictly cannot be fitted to an S2 car as they have no side airbags in them.
3. Hatch rear seats will not easily fit an Estate and vice-versa.
4. Seatbelt pretensioner connections are diffferent between S1, early and late S2. Wiring changes may be needed.
If purchasing a set of seats, make sure you get the full seat wiring loom and the heater controls that fit in the centre console tray. If putting S2 seats in an S1, also get the front seatbelts complete with bolts and the rear seatbelt buckles that bolt to the floorpan. They are significantly different. You do not need to change the upper rear belts that go to the inertia reels, only the lower sections.
Also get the pretensioner plugs from the donor loom plus about 6 inches of wire as you may need to change the pretensioner wiring.
Removal of the rear seats from a donor is easy. Six bolts hold the backs in and four nuts hold the bases. The removal of the front seats demand that they are still able to be powered; they are impossible to remove if they cannot be powered from one end of their rails to the other in order to remove the front and rear mounting bolts.
When all the front seat mounting bolts are out, the electrical connections can be disconnected. The main one is a rectangular connector with two thick wires and a number of thin ones. There is also (on the S2 at least) a thin earth wire to a whitre connector, the seatbelt pretensioner connection on either an orange (S1) or brown (S2) plug and the side airbag on a green plug (S2 only). Observe normal precautions when disconnecting the airbags on S2 seats.
Remove the seats and seatbelts from the car. Remove the centre console and trace the wiring looms from the seats into the centre console. You will find the loom is earthed to a stud on the passengers side crossmember under the seat and also a thin earth wire between the seats and earthing to the same point.
If you follow the loom into the centre console, you will see that it mostly ends at the seat heater controls and one or maybe two thick wire(s) disappear off in the direction of the fascia fusebox. If you initially see two thick wires, at some point in the loom you'll find these will join and become one. Unpick as much of the main loom as possible to get as much length of these wires out as possible. This is the main power feed that eventually ends up on a 40A fuse in the fusebox.
Take a careful note of how the whole loom sits in the donor car if possible as you have to replicate it in the receiving car.
the next post will detail fitting.
