Loud & Low 8th Gen Civic - Time to say good bye to her.

[HatersGonnaHate]

Come on Scott, time to step your game up

[04murdalanche]

Loved this build from the start. Wish I had the cash for a bit one:(

[Brettward]

I'm pretty interested in this build, sucks about that accident though! But the design you got looks sweet

[scooter99]

Nice start Man.

I really like all the planning with sketchup!

I'd do the same thing if I was able to use it that well. lol

Good luck getting the car straightened out, been there...no fun .

Curious to see how you trim out your trunk since I'm deep in the middle of mine.

It took so much practice and learning on the fly to learn to do it this well. And I'm not even as good as average I don't think.

Yeah hang out, maybe we can learn from each other. I'm anxious to see what you do with yours as well!

Trunk is gonna look sexy like that...definitely gonna check this out at autorama

I'm hoping I make it in time. If so, I'll be happy to show it to you.

Come on Scott, time to step your game up

I'm working on it, had a rough day! Tomorrow should show some progress though!

Loved this build from the start. Wish I had the cash for a bit one:(

Thanks for hanging in there with me. I know it's been a while. The bit one was a great tool, but in the end, it was just too advanced for me. So I had to let it go. But it'll all work out! Honestly was thinking about a bit ten D but if I end up with one, it won't be till much later down the line.

I'm pretty interested in this build, sucks about that accident though! But the design you got looks sweet

Thanks.

Speaking of the car and the accident etc. Here's my tally for the FUCK UPS from the body shop thus far!

1. New Paint Color is way off from the original

2. Window doesn't automatically roll up and stay up

3. Alignment pulls hard to the left after being told "it's perfect"

Today's finds:

4. Driver door speaker doesn't work

5. Driver door handle doesn't work from the outside properly. Takes two pulls to open. First pulls latch to barely open, then second opens.

So needless to say I'm absolutely pissed about everything! I'll be going back over there monday! But with that being the case, I need to get some things done just in case they keep it for a while again.

First I need to get the head unit out and put the stock unit back in. This will give me the Alpine unit and the aftermarket dash kit to work with.

Second I want to get a couple cardboard cutouts done of the doors where I want to put the 8's and tweets.

That should get me by for a bit, the tablet and head unit stuff alone will be quite time consuming, but at least it'll keep me working while I don't have the car.

Like I said, I still have a ton of pics to post, but with everything that's gone on today and tonight, I haven't gotten to do that. So I'll get that done tomorrow or tomorrow night. Look for em then!

Thanks for the support guys! I hope I can keep you all entertained while this progresses!

[scooter99]

Ok so I'm going to try and get some stuff posted. We're having some hard winds and rains here in Sac and power is out all around us, so I may loose power at some point. But here goes!

I should have some free time today, and in that time I'm going to work a bit on my head unit.

Here's a little flash back of what I was doing. I'll quote some stuff from my previous thread, and that will catch you up to where I'm at now. Then I'll go over what I'm going to do now.

Here we go:

This is where I started actually doing stuff on the extension. Testing basically.

So here's where I'm at with the Alpine Face Plate Extension Project.

I got the head unit out of the truck tonight and just started looking at stuff and getting some ideas on how to tackle this project.

My oldest daughter was a little jealous, bless her heart cause her sister got to be on a picture in the build. So she wanted in on one as well!

So I got everything laid out, all my pieces to this puzzle.

Put the face plate on the unit and examined the contacts a little bit. Here is the close up on them.

You can see on this one, that there is a little tab on either side of the contact connector. This is key cause the contacts really only go in one way smoothly. The other way it goes in, but it's kind of forced. So this is a good thing for orientation purposes!

With this connector, you can see the top connectors extend down, and the bottom connectors aren't so extended. This is another helpful piece of info for orientation!

This is just a view of back of the female connector and the top of the male connector.

Showing them connected

Same basic thing, just roles reversed this time.

Connected

This just shows how the connector will go into it's spot

[scooter99]

Both of the base plates. The top one is the new piece and then you see the connector in front. After looking a bit at it, I may change out the one on the unit cause it's a little worn. The one for the faceplate to be held on, doesn't need to do anything but hold the faceplate. The base unit one, needs to be moved if I need to put in a cd. Anyway, moving on.

Now it's time to get our color chart and wires all situated so I have a guide to go off of. No reason to mess something up by guessing right.

Now that I have that going on, lets take a look at the wires and colors

I wrote down colors as I thought they should go. But then I discovered later that they had numbers on the wires. So I changed the color code later.

[scooter99]

Here's what's in each cable. Remember there's 8 cables in the main run. So each pair per cable equals 16 little wires. There's 16 contacts on each plug. Make sense now!

So after looking at the female connector I wondered what it looked like in the unit. So I decided to take the front off and look for myself.

To my surprise this is what I found. I don't know exactly what I was expecting but I thought I'd have a ribbon cable or something in there. It's a board that has another plug on it, that plugs into a female plug that's soldered on the main board. WOW.

This is how it's soldered to the board.

So I started stripping, wire that is!

One down, one to go

Two down.

[scooter99]

Ok so last night I was able to fire up the soldering iron and get the head unit extension all finished up and working! Well, sort of! Here's how it went down!

First I got everything out and started working on it, pretty much where I left off from last time. Recall that everything was stripped off and ready to solder on the wires. Now my original plan was to just solder from the outside in, meaning I was going to lay the wires on to the tabs and solder them on and then bend them and do the other side. After looking at them for a bit, I decided that these tabs were just not strong enough to really do that. I decided the up most care was needed in the soldering and handling of the connector tabs. So to solve that and get that result, I decided that the best thing to do, would be to bend the wires in an "L" shape and solder them that way, and then when they go on the tabs, they'll be resting on the strongest part of the tab, which is not the wing, but the body of each tab. So that's where I started. I needed to tin each little wire. 8 pairs, twice = 32 wires! Actually kind of went pretty quickly! Check it out!

Before tinning

Just to see the plan, if it'll work better!

Time to solder

Same here, pre tinning

Now I started to solder the wires to the tabs. But I pulled these wires off.

Rather than try to fight space all the way down, I'm blind already and I was wearing my glasses, but my head was killing me after looking at this stuff for a while in crappy light! So I tried to make it a little easier on myself by doing it from the bottom up instead of the top down.

[scooter99]

It's a little rough right now.

But I can clean that up!

Now it's time to move on to the next connector. I actually found this one tougher than the first one. These tabs seemed thinner and more brittle than the other one. I decided to do the same thing with these. "L" shaped wire from the inside. Also from the bottom up.

Again a little rough and then cleaned up! BTW, I don't claim to be the best solderer in the world, I'm still learning. So if anyone thinks they can give any suggestions as to how to better my solder joints, I"m all ears! Thanks! Moving on!

Soldered up and ready for some support and connection.

Got out the hot glue gun and started filling the wires up and this will help support the weight of the wires and prevent the soldered tabs and bare wires from touching.

Side one

Side two

[scooter99]

Now to move a little up the wires for more support. Once again, it's not the cleanest, which if you all know me by now is driving me nuts, but like I said a bit earlier my head was killing me, and I was getting impatient with these connectors. No excuse to let the details get away from me I know, but it's what I'm using for this now.

Ready to put it in it's home.

What you'd see if I took the face plate off. Looks factory! I compared it to the one from the factory, and it's the exact same distance, which is flush. I'm happy with it.

Wires supporting themselves and the connector and base.

Now, on to the next one! Same thing done here, I'll just post pics, you get the idea.