The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 28
The Challenge/New Experience: Help my friend Kelly install her new car stereo.
This week’s New Thing came to me by way of an e-mail from my good buddy Kelly (with a Y) last Friday — a win-win situation for both of us. She had a new car stereo that needed installing; I had a weekend coming up and no idea what my New Thing of the week would be. Those thieves at Best Buy wanted $50 for installation — highway robbery! Let’s do it! Sisters workin’ it out for themselves!
How hard could it be?
To be fair to both of us, neither Kelly nor I went into this blindly. We did our due diligence, or our due Googling at least. I found some GREAT step-by-step instructions that turned out to be for a different car entirely (but I swear it’s got her make and model number on there!), which recommended that we essentially take the entire car apart.
My point, though, is that we knew this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, and we both went into it with a feeling that this was going to be a difficult task, but we were going to emerge from it triumphantly, as better people, with a great feeling of accomplishment.
Did we succeed? Hit the jump to find out!
First step, obviously, is to remove the original car stereo. Here’s the obligatory “Before” picture:
Before: Original factory-installed car stereo.
Removing the panel involved a few screws here and there, including one behind the clock:
And after a little bit of frustration, we got the front panel free:
But not without a little forcing on my part (sorry, Kell):
I did that with a flathead screwdriver.
Next step was to remove the old car stereo, and at this point that was just a matter of removing a few more screws and unplugging some cables. Here’s Kelly with the fruits of our labor so far:
So far, so good! The next few steps, the actual mounting and cabling of the new stereo, is what tripped us up. Kelly had purchased a mounting kit, and the instructions for it were very confusing. This flummoxed me for the better part of an hour. But I finally sussed it out:
But then we hit the Insurmountable Pass. The cabling. Now, as I said, I did my due diligence and I knew we would need what is called a wire harness, which basically takes all the cables from your new car stereo and fits them into a plug, which you can then connect up to your car.
The wire harness came with instructions too:
My favorite instruction is the vague, "Connect to other wires."
We spent a lot of time looking at wires. Finally, I admitted this was way beyond me. We got pretty close, but I couldn’t conceive of any way to, as the instructions so helpfully suggested, “connect to other wires.” Defeat.
On the bright side, Kelly was able to take the car in to Best Buy the next day on her lunch hour. They were able to complete the job for her in 20 minutes:
So this goes in the Failure column, but it’s not a total loss. I had never removed a car stereo before, so that’s something that I can check off at least. Also, we learned a valuable lesson. $50 bucks for a car stereo installation is a great deal.
Related posts:
If you ever find the need to tackle a car stereo installation again here is a good resource:
http://www.crutchfield.com/
You simply specify the car make and model and they give you a list of what fits. They also provide complete kits with step-by-step instructions so you’ll never have a problem like you had with the wiring harness. They would provide you with a harness that plugged directly in.
I’m with you on $50 being reasonable to swap out a dash unit. However, if you’re also changing speakers or adding MP3 plugs it can get expensive very fast. A complete stereo system might end up with $400 installion cost.
In cases where the installation is expensive, Crutchfield makes sense. They’ll provide a bullet-proof kit you can use for less than installation cost and save you some money.
We sure tried everything! It was a fun task, but yeah, I was happy to pay the $50 to get it installed. You never know if you can or can’t do something until you at least try.
Thanks again Heidi for helping me try to figure it out. I really appreciate it. And just so everyone knows, that tiny hole we made with the screwdriver is hidden behind the panel cover. So, no one will ever see it.
Once the new stereo was in, I forgot that I had the back speakers turned off because they rattle. So, I just turned them off again(this new stereo has a lot more power) and everything is hunky dory. I can do without new speakers right now. It was a big deal to get a new stereo finally.
On to the next adventure!
Hi, Kelly with a Y! You look adorable!
The only thing I could think of while looking at these pics (stereo notwithstanding) is that Kelly with a Y has a much nicer car than mine!
Glad it all worked out OK in the end.
While I think they should just install the thing for free as part of the sale, this is one of those no-brainer “it’s worth $50 to me to have someone else do it” things. And on a lot of cars nowadays there’s all kinds of weird things that reset from the stereo, including I thought one or two that would mean your car doesn’t go.
Of course today I was looking at new cars, and they had all these fancy things that made me say “dammit, I don’t want a fancy touch screen XM radio/navigation thing. I want something with a few big buttons I can punch as I’m driving to change the station”