This may be frowned at by officionados amongst you, but may just be of use to someone else attempting the same project as moi, so I'm telling you about it. I have leather seats from a 98 Elite which I'm in the proces of fitting to my 03 facelift 2.2CD as I like leather. Nuff said ;-). Seems to be going ok, but the problem of facelifts having seat airbags and the proposed front seats
not was posing a bit of a problem. A visit to a streetwise Vauxhall dealer employee sorted that; if you go to the seat connections under the side trims between the door and seats on the floor, you'll find all the connections for motors, heating and airbags. The airbag ones are the yellow ones with yellow connectors. Disconnect the battery and wait for a while until the charge to the airbag dissipates (a friend advised 10 minutes but I left it 45 as I didn't relish the prospect of an airbag going off in my face as I worked :-?) and then pull the connectors apart. Bridge the terminals of the connection farthest away from the seats, ie the end going to the battery as opposed to the seats, securely with a 2.6 or 2.7 ohm resistor, 0.5 watts, as available from Maplins price 13p a pop, and this fools various circuits into thinking that the airbag is still wired in, as opposed to the red airbag light lighting on the dash suggesting it is not. This does not affect the efficiency of the warning circuit for
other airbags which may have a fault. Hey presto; the project can now continue unhindered, and seats minus airbags can be fitted with confidence. A different Vauxhall dealer, for whom I used to work on the sales side, chose to take the official "seats fitted should be of standard specification only" tack; what rot - if the prefacelift Omega was unsafe without a seat airbag it'd surely have been condemned long before now......happy days