I am lazy. Lay-zee. With a capital L and a drawn out aaayyy. If I had my choice we'd be paying people to do all sorts of things for us. Terrible, but just being honest.
We've been staring at a big hole in the dash where the stereo is supposed to be for quite some time now. With the stock stereo being useless -- Japanese FM frequency range and cassette player (haven't had a tape since Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet) -- we ripped it out while cleaning.
A road trip to Sydney at the end of this month (for a massive camper show no less) has given us some incentive to get our asses in gear. So we found ourselves at Autobarn yesterday, picking out a cheap, decent CD/MP3 player.
"How much do you charge to install?"
"A hundred bucks"
"Is it easy? Can we do it ourselves?"
"Well, this is how many wires there are" (at this point he held up a mess of wires).
"So you guys solder and shrink tube it all?"
"Some places do. We just use tape. If you know how to twist the wires they don't come apart"
That about did it. Yvonne decided right there and then that I would be installing the stereo.
Overqualified
You'd think that, with a diploma in Electronics, this would be a snap for me. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.
All the right tools
Autobarn doesn't solder and shrink tube, but we sure the hell do. For forty bucks we got all the necessary tools for the job: solder, shrink tube, and my new favourite man toy -- the cordless soldering iron. It's butane powered and is actually a pen torch, but with a soldering tip you screw on at the end.
It also came with a little handheld torch. So now I can solder anywhere at all, and Yvonne can finally make me a proper creme brulee.
The job
The stock stereo in these vans are double din -- that is, they are twice the height of a normal stereo. This meant we had to get a little kit and I had to fumble with the mounting bracket to make it all fit. But I got it.
The wiring was slow. Luckily I found the original wiring scheme, once again thanks to the Delica Club. It took some time to translate those wires to the stereo's wires. After soldering the power wires and attaching the ground, I tested out all the speakers to make sure the wiring was right.Got it.
In the end, I was of course glad we (Yvonne) chose to do this ourselves (myself). We saved money, I learned something new, and we have those really cool tools now.
