Bringing back to life an 18 year old Audi A8 D2 - part 4

In this part of the recomissioning, I'll focus one some of the interior work that I've done to the car.

The 2 front Recaro seats have leaky lumbar support, it's a super common fault on all the D2's.

Once pumped up they won't stay inflated for more than 1 second. To investigate I took the seats apart and found that on both of them the control valve had cracked inlet/outlet ports:

After doing some quick research online I found that BMW E38/e39 valve block is a direct plug and play replacement, but also a much better and solid design:

The BMW part number is 8360408.

The pump as well is a much more beefier design and is a direct plug and play replacement:

A few months later, the compressor itself broke as the seal has burst and it wasn't producing pressure anymore so I went looking at BMW equivalents again and found that BMW E60 lumbar support pump is a much much better design. BMW

Initially i took the seats out of the car to investigate the fault but later I've done the other seat in the car to save time:

Fold the seat flat:

Unzip the bottom part:

Carefully unlatch and lift up the back rest:

From here you can access the left bolster where the pump and valve block are installed:

The final bit was to take care of the missing seat control buttons on passenger side. Usually only the whole control module is available but I was able to find someone in Poland on allegro.pl selling the switches on its own, saving me about £80:

Thanks to my friend Patryk for bringing them over on his return trip from Poland.

Few weeks later it was time to spend around £1k on powder coating 5x used 18" alloys and 5x bf Goodrich all season tyres:

Old tyres were from 2013 and the wrong size. Alloys themselves were some universal fit generic brand wheel:

The car also looked wrong on them:

Part 5 - suspension: