seat swap cloth to leather help please
 

So I was recently at the junkyard to get a new fuel connector and when I got there an 05 rx8 just arrived I took the leather heated automatic seat for $200 and then in great condition. I have a 2005 shinka edition with manual cloth seats. My main question is what am I going to have to do to make the heated/power seat work? Thanks in advance

It's real easy. Just make sure you get all the wiring that comes off the leather heated/auto seats. The cloth setup still has the connections out of the carpet for the upgraded seats. I did this to my 04 with absolutely no issues. Others have had trouble, but I think they might have been missing pieces. As long as you have all the wiring (there's like 4 different pieces that connect up for leather seats, but a couple of those are connected inside the bracket at the bottom of the seat, so the ones you're looking at should have everything you need right in the car.

Derek

I installed the seats today and i have a few questions. 1) my seat the power seat, doesn't work in the car... but when i hook it up directly to a power supply it works fine. but not when its hooked up to the car. 2) for the heated seats.... i took off the shift know and lifted the center console and i thought there might be wires/ connectors there for the heated seats but there wasn't connectors. there was about 10 or more wires but they were all snipped. is this what i need? they don't match the wires for the heated seat switches though.

I'm not sure if you got this fixed by now or not but you might want to check that the power seat and heated seat fuses are in your fuse box. My RX-8 didn't come with these options and those fuses are not present in my box.

will the passenger airbag light still work with a swap from cloth to leather seats??

ehh that im not to sure of, in the 2005 they dont have the passenger air bag lights

i wired the seats myself took about an hour and everything works great

I'm having trouble with this as well. Long story short, my 04 died, bought an 05 without leather or anything, and both of the connectors on the bottom of the seats are there, and connect fine, but, my power seat still doesn't work, and to top it all off, my seat heater wiring isn't in the Console in the 05.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Yeah this is a weird issue, I had a two members come to my house to swap seats only to find that despite the wiring and the fuses being there, the seats still did not work in the sport model.

Efff!

The connectors were the same for mine but the wires needed for the heat and power where not there. I had to run them myself

Did anyone find out what the issue was? I'm having this issue and it won't work on my 05.

If you look at the harness that is your car that goes connected to the harness on the seat, you will notice that from the car it is missing several connections that are needed to power the extra connectors the seat has. You would have to run the wires another way... I found this out the hard way when I got a good deal on some leather seats to find out they couldn't work without some electrical work.

Any idea or photo ideas on how to do this? I drove all the way to Frisco to do the seat swap and the guy that has more knowledge than I do was swamped with this issue. Now I'm back in Vegas with a non working automatic seat lol. I'm not the most technologically auto savvy guy out there... LoL!

I honestly don't know... When this happened to me and I realized the connections were different I figured I would remove the whole center console and see if I could find the extra cables there. You can find all the cables bunched up together, but like I said I'm not a electrician and I wouldn't really be able to do it myself, nor do I want to risk messing anything up. I'm sure you can take it to somebody and they can easily wire it so that it can work. You should make their lives easier and remove the driver side seats, the whole center console, and move the carpet so that they don't have to remove that in the process, and hopefully they should charge you less for that as well since they have less labor to do.

Your other option would be what another member of these forums did, he removed the manual bracket off of his old cloth seats, and took apart his leather powered seats and made them manual seats. Obviously they were no longer powered and I don't think he had his heated feature working either. I might just do this since I don't want to spend anymore money at the moment, I just want leather seats don't care if they're powered or not.

I ran new wires from accessory fuse to the seat. It was a pain and had to gut the car for a few hours but it was worth it

I did the swap in an 07 sport with no issues. The stock connectors provided power andd everything, the fuses were in place. I think it's the earlier 8s that have issues with this.

This thread keeps popping up in my google searches so today I swapped my 05 model cloth manual seats and door panels for an 04 model leather, power, heated seats with the console switches.
Under my console the wiring is missing for the switches and my seats will not power. I've already found a wire diagram on rx7 club so I can wire them up. My question is I have access to the 04 model I got the seats out of, this is not a wrecked car so I dont want to ruin anything on the car. Should I trace the heat switch wires down and take them? Should I do the same for the power/lumbar wiring? Just curious if anyone has done that already or if it would be smarter to just run my own wires to the fuse box...any help would be appreciated.

How did you wire the electric. My wiring harness also didn't power the electrical and looking for a way to power the seats

How do you turn a powered seat into a manual seat please explain details
 

how do you turn a powered seat into a manual seat details please explain anybody that's done it please reply

Help
 

I'm changing my cloth interior into red and black leather before I sell the other car I hooked up the leather seat into my car and the power seat did not work I just want to turn it into a manual seat how the other people did it

Hi James,

It's not a popular mod, but it IS easy!

One wire from the cigar lighter to the seat and you have all the adjustments, including lumbar.

Another on a switch gets you seat heaters!

Diagram

Seats are on page P1.....have fun!