Octavia leather seat retrofit, for the benefit of those planning this upgrade.

I think I'm pretty representative of the average mechanical ability of the "hands on" members of this forum. I researched the forum before undertaking the retrofit of Octavia II (2007) black leather seats into my Octavia II (2009) FL Elegance with manual cloth seats. The seats were bought from a online breaker for £345 and appear to be from an L&K with heated front, and electric memory drivers seat. Having removed my cloth seats and compared them to the leather, the following was apparent:

(Note: Disconnect the battery, your about to play with a pyrotechnic explosive airbag, the problems you face clearing fault lights is minor compared to broken bones).

1. The leather seat airbag wiring is different colours, but the yellow connector fits the car and is plug & play (Having tested it on the car at this stage to prove the theory, the airbag light extinguished when the engine was started, proving that the plug is wired the same and installing a different airbag to the car does not trigger a fault).

2. The leather drivers seat frame is completely different to my cloth seat frame with no scope whatsoever for fitting my manual adjusters to it (gloom!)

This meant I had to remove the leather skin from the seat, then fit it to my cloth seat frame, this was lot of work. The leather seat base leather unclips from the frame easily, then remove it as one with the foam base (they are attached to each other by many "pig rings" which are a pig to remove and replace, keeping the two together will save you a lot so agro). I cut the the heated seat wires off as there is no easy way to make these work, and this avoids having to dismantle to wiring loom. The plastic trims and adjuster knobs can all be removed intact with time and care. The leather seat back skin must be removed from the frame completely (the seat back has electric lumbar adjustment which you can't make work on a manual seat base; also the airbag and lumbar adjustment mechanism prevent you removing the foam and leather skin as one piece), this is an hour or mores work which you have to do again on the cloth seat to expose the frame you need to fit the leather skin to. Fitting the leather skin to the cloth seat frame is up to 2 hours work and your fingers will be cut to shreds (many pig clips to reattach). You have to cut a hole in the leather skin once fitted, to allow the lumbar adjuster hand wheel to be fitted.

Fitting the seats into the car is easy. I chose not to purchase the door cards as you potentially end up with different trim colour between the dashboard and door cards, which would look odd and bug me. The one job remaining is to purchase and fit a leather cover for the jumbo box which I've seen on the superskoda website.

Reconnecting the battery and running the engine showed a power steering warning light, but this is easily cleared by rotating the steering to the limit in each direction (covered in detail elsewhere on the forum).

I'm very happy with the result, but on reflection if I'd known how much work (about 9 hours) was involved, I'd have bought a VRS leather interior as they are predominantly manual adjustment and would fit without modification.

Just sent you a PM: you may be able to help me out with some bits I am after [fingers crossed]