So, having got myself a second car that's mine to do what I want with again at last (for the first time in years as previously I had the other veccy which was the family car and needed to stay pretty standard), I thought I'd make a start on my future ICE install.
Now, when I picked this car up it was a serious bargain, I paid just under £4k for it (ex police surveillance car, full police service history, 47k on the clock), I knew it was going to need a few bits of plastic inside but let's just say I'd underestimated it. I have just replaced the last scratched/broken/paint picked off bit of plastic and to date have spent nearly £700 on bits of plastic trim, there goes my new head unit budget.
Anyway, completely fed up with the standard CDR 2005 (anyone want one?), I rooted around in my storage and started digging out any and all of my old ICE install that I still had. This install is going to be very much a long term "temporary" install while I get some funds sorted again to buy the head unit and new amps I want. (Alpine IVA-W205R double din headunit and new Alpine amps) but turns out I have enough kit floating around (almost) to do a sort of half decent (but oldish) install.
This is going to be a long project over a very long period of time no doubt, but hopefully it's ok for me to use here to document it, I'm sure someone will tell me if not.
So, tonights fun...
Got home from work about 6pm ish and started on the car straight away. Here she is sporting all here brand new shiny plastic bits in standard form.
So having bought the double din puller keys and a head unit adaptor plate in advance off I went. Out came the head unit and the old cage.
And in went the adaptor plate which it turns out doesn't fit properly and is the wrong damn colour however, this is only a "temporary" install (although relatively long term) and I will need a different double din adaptor when the new head unit is finally mine so I'll live with it for now.
Now this temporary install will include an old Alpine TDM-7535R headunit (one of the best in it's day, sadly not by todays standards but still a decent unit), a 6 disc Alpine CHM-S600 6 disc changer, several amps, speaker upgrades and some serious bass. Tonight however was just about getting the headunit and the changer in and working. I plan on fitting the changer in as part of the boot build eventually, but for now, the glove box will do.
I removed the glove box completely, ran the cd changer lead through a newly cut hole in the back of the glove box, tied up the excess cabling behind it to make sure it was secure and ran the other end out where the headunit will shortly be. You can just make the lead out in the background of this 1st photo.
And the unit sitting in place, I'm not bothering fixing it down at this point as this is a temporary home for it and I want to minimise the holes I make in the car un-neccessarily. Conveniently when the changer and the vauxhall car owners black folder are on top of each other it holds it nice and tight with the glovebox shut.
I then clicked the convenient adaptor lead bought from Halfords onto the existing loom, mounted the Alpine cage in the new single din slot, connected all the leads and proceeded to test the unit. Success!! it was all working great, I'd even remembered to buy the adaptor lead with the permanent and switched lives swapped already so that I didn't have to hack them around. However one minor issue was that the second I switched the unit on, the dashboard display lost the date obviously because the normal radio would display information there which this old unit wont. Ok, simple enough, which wire is connected from the headunit into the loom and goes live when the unit is switched on? Of course, the old electric aerial lead, a quick test with a multi-meter confirmed this was the culprit so I removed the cable from the adaptor completely and everything works just fine and I keep my time, temperature and date on the dash display. So, tonights hard work results in this...
Tomorrow, the real fun starts, first things first I have these baby's to replace the existing front door speakers. Alpine DD-Drive 6.5" component set and of course I've bought the adaptor plates for the speakers, so soundproof the doors better, seal the adaptors in place, run new, much better quality cabling and mount the crossovers in the doors and replace the standard speakers and tweeters with these. Again as a temporary measure these will be powered off the head unit as I have the amps I need for the rear speakers and two of the subs but not for the front or the other two subs yet.
Just to give an idea of some of the bits that will be going into this "temporary" install, there are 2 x 12" and currently 1 x 10" (the other one had got damaged in storage so I'm currently looking for a partner for the one left) Alpine subwoofers that will be custom built into the boot.
And at the moment this is some of the other bits I've got kicking around from my old setup which will be going into this install until I've got the funds to replace them with something a bit more modern
2 x Alpine 3540 (2 x 65W / 1 x 110W bridged), each of these will power the back doors one each in bridged mode.
2 x Alpine 3542 (2 x 150W / 1 x 270W bridged), each of these will power one of the 12" subs in bridged mode.
There's also an old Alpine active crossover to filter the sub bass to the sub amps, an old fuse box, some decent battery terminals and some old passive crossovers that may or may not get used for the rear doors depending on what I eventually buy speaker wise for the rear.
Hopefully, this install will evolve over time and I'll keep this thread updated (assuming I'm ok to do so with the mods/admins) as it progresses.
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