A day late...
I decided to do some cleaning while I had the carpet pulled up. Somebody spilled some soda and left it there without cleaning it up. Mild surface rust and a sticky carpet. While there isn't much I can do right now about the carpet, I can clean up the rust. I used my drill and round wire brush to remove the surface rust and then I painted over it with some Hammered Finnish silver paint. It matches the original perfectly and below you can see the results:
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I decided to put the wiring harness in even though it wasn't hooked up, partly because that would get it out of my way, but mostly because that would give me the push i needed to get it working. After putting the carpet back and the original seat back, I decided to do some final checks of the wiring to make sure I was on the right track.
2005_______________-> 2003
green with tan stripe ----> blue
green with grey stripe ---> green
AND
Red with BLUE stripe is power for the seat
Wednesday night, with the help of my wonderful wife, I swapped out the seat. I had earlier bought an "add-a-circuit" fuse replacement thingy so I tapped into the sun-roof circuit, ran the wire down to where the carpet ended up front and my wires were sticking out, used a wire nut to join them and plugged it in and...
... nuthn.
I was sunk. I thought that I had spent good money on bad seats. My wife suggested I try the passenger seat to verify. After verifying that the power wires were in the right spot, I took the drivers seat out and put in the passenger seat and still... nuthin.
Time to break out the volt meter.
I wasn't getting anything at the cable plug, but I was getting power at the fuse. I traced it back... and the wire nut was too small and the two wires weren't joined. I twisted them together and presto - power seat!
Sometimes its the little things...](*,)
I soldered that connection and wrapped it in electrical tape. that'll do until I get to putting a wire into the back of the fuse block connector. I don't have the heat running, but now that I have proven that my wiring guesstimations were correct, I'll worry about that when I get the chance to put the wire into the fuse block proper-like.
The sun is super extra bright today, but here is the power seat installed:
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I like it a lot (my XJ has manual leather seats so I'm used to the feel), and my wife will take a little getting used to them. They are hands down more comfortable than the 2005 seats, and not half destroyed like the one I took out. This weekend we'll be putting the back seat in, and I'll be working on building the passenger seat with the air-bag sensor from the 2005 swapped to the 2003.
I will also make a full How-To on this. I realize that there is already one on how to add leather seats - I've contributed to it myself. But the wiring that I have had to deal with is different from every other example in there. So if somebody can benefit from my trials -- and errors -- all the better.
