1. Bluetooth cell phone support - absolutely imperative. I hate it when I see somebody trying to drive while holding a phone to their head with one hand.
2. Bluetooth audio streaming.
3. Full iPod support, with a big enough screen to show track info: title, performer and album. The Pioneer just gave a meaningless "track number".
4. Pandora streaming audio support - at least track selection from the screen, and even better, channel switching and thumbs up/down.
5. Android phone support, since that's what I use.
In addition, there was some stuff I wanted to clean up - the remains of a Sirius satellite radio setup. That's the wad of wiring in the photo below:
There's a right way and a wrong way to hook up aftermarket radios. Fortunately, the right was is also the easy way - buy an adapter plug that matches the car's wiring harness. However, the cheap way is to cut the harness and hard-wire the radio, and you never know until you get there which it will be.
Almost all these radios fit into a metal cage, and there's a special tool to unlatch them and remove them from the cage. Of course, I didn't have that from the Pioneer, but luckily the one for the new JVC radio was able to unlatch it. I pulled it out, and found this:
OK, so this was an amateur installation. Did they cut the harness, or not? Keep pulling...
Whew! They used the adapter plug - that's the factory plug peeking out from the hole. Still some other stuff hooked up in there, though. What?
That thing with the bar code is a power plug that would normally plug into the cigarette lighter, taped into a lighter plug adapter, which is then wired into the harness for the radio power. It was hidden inside the dash. I'm not as likely to mock that as you would think - it's a clean way to hide power, in this case, for that Sirius radio I'm removing. Out it goes.
This, however, I'm a little more likely to mock. I found another double power plug hiding in the console! Nothing hooked to it, and the power was taken from stolen wires in the factory harness. Sorry for the blurry photo:
I noted the color codes on the wires, and unlike last time, I remembered to use the German codes. Tracking it down in the schematics, it was the lighting circuit for the cigarette lighter plug. The plastic for that light was broken away, and I don't smoke, so I just shrink-wrapped the two wires and put them back in the harness.
Removing all this fixed an odd problem! I had noted that the dash lights were always on when the car was running, even when the lights were off, and also the dimmer for the dash lights didn't work. I don't know if it was the radio installation or this plug wired in, but now it all works right.
If this is all I had done, it would have been a quick trip! But, there was something else I wanted to fix. The power window switches are in the console, and when I bought the car, Chris warned me that the passenger side of the console was broken and the switch would fall down through the hole. I secured it with an ugly kludge - zip ties to keep the switch from entering the hole:
Pulling that console was a real bear - it took me about three hours, and I found a lot of evidence of this blog's recurring theme: Somebody has been here before! Old plastic loses its pliability, and attachment points bend or break, and I found prior fixes, especially around the glove box. But finally, it was out, leaving a mess that looks much more scary than it actually is:
Take a look at that boot around the shifter also - a huge crack at the front. Faulkner BMW got me a new one in only about four hours, and I replaced that while I was in there.
I disassembled the console, and then I could see the problem. A very thin plastic ring, molded into the console, was all that holds those switches. I tried gluing it back together with super glue, and reinforced it with J-B Weld epoxy (left side):
I'll go ahead and tell the rest of this story first - it didn't work. Once I had it all back together, the first time I pressed the switch it popped loose again. Oh well... that part of the console is in the parts system still (for $170), should I ever get enough steam to pull the console again. For now, it's back to the zip ties...
So, that evening I sat at our kitchen island and wired the cable harness for the new radio. No cable nuts for me! The left photo shows me soldering the connection, and the right shrinking the shrink wrap sleeve. I use a cordless soldering iron for tasks like this, powered by the same gas used in cigarette lighters. The glowing dot in the right picture is the exhaust - a perfect heat source for shrinking the tubing without touching it.
Once it's all done, wrap it and you've got a neat harness that won't cause problems if snagged during installation.
A few more repairs to the glove box and console along the way, and then it all went back together. Dave Russell was a big help in trying to get the console back in place. Its alignment is still not perfect - an incentive to take it back apart someday to replace that lower console piece. Geez... another $170 part...
Here's a pic of the radio, playing music streamed by Bluetooth from the very phone taking the picture! How very 2013 of me. Oddly, the word "pause" on the screen is not visible to the human eye. Some dicey programming to keep refreshing and erasing it, but nobody knows unless they take a picture with a fast camera.
One more new bit - it was actually my Christmas present. How does my sweet wife know exactly what to buy me? ;-) The tall plastic knob is the original, cracked and crazed with age and use. The leather one is from a ZHP 3-series BMW, which was a special edition with some nice bits. This knob, besides being shorter, is also weighted, and gives a lot of the effect of a short-throw shifter at about an eighth of the cost. I swear it makes my trans shift better!
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