Sorry, been a long time coming for photos. I didn't take very many and the car is halfway across the world at this point. I left it at my parents house in NJ. I now live in Hawaii and have a 5th gen here.
This is what it looked like when I bought the seats. They came out of an e46 sedan and were dovetail grey. Paid $100 for both and $20 for an extra wiring harnesses and bmw switches for the seat heaters. Got them all to function but I had to look up the part numbers and schematics, then figure out a way to tap into our own fuse box.
While I had the stock seats apart, I also took the seat sensor out of the passenger side foam and placed it under the leather, over the foam of the BMW 3-series seats. It worked perfectly so that if anyone sat in the seat, seatbelt light would go off and once they clipped in, it went off. I did this for safety and to help ensure the passenger airbag would still deploy.
I bought the black kit from leatherique, filled the cracks with their products and redyed them to black. It looked amazing after it was first complete, but it has not held up as well as others have said it would. You can google it and see countless other forums. I had my hopes up because someone dyed their e46 bmw m3 seats red and theirs stayed that way for years. I only had them in the car a few months before I purchased my 5th gen. They were decent but started chipping. The dye is similar to plastidip when it's dry. It is more of a paint coat than a dye that seeps in and stains the leather FYI. Had I really known this, I would have paid the extra $100-200 for wet okole covers for these seats than buy the leatherique kit.
I sold the skins on my old seats and bought tan leather rear seat skins from the forum. I dyed those black also so I would have a full leather interior. I also purchased a leather skin for the center console and dyed that black also. It was already black but I wanted it all to be the same tone of black.
I didn't take photos, but I cut apart the old seat rails on the stock seats. I had to drill the tack welded spots on the mounting feet and rail to get the feet off. This took several hours just to take them off. I did one seat at a time so I could be sure I could still drive the car. I did the passenger first to get a better idea of how long it would take before I did the driver side install. I used 1/4" cold rolled steel bars I purchased online to the exact size I wanted. No local shops had this available. I had gone to several metal fabricators and shops and they all told me they couldn't give me a real estimate since they had no idea how long it would take but rate of $150/hr so I did everything myself. I've installed tons of head units, had just a few weeks earlier done a TRS projector retrofit so I was pretty confident I could do it. In the end, it worked out but my wife hated I was spending so much time on this car. The project took several weeks because of drying and waiting for the correct pieces to make the brackets. Once I had everything, the actual installation after I had the seats prepped took a weekend. Sat for the passenger, sun for the driver seat.
