beyond the veil

I have some long-term work going on with the transmission linkage in my beetle


but I'm waiting for some parts at the moment, so I can't drive it, but I can't work on the shifter either. So I'm working on one of the very long list of electrical nits that need to be fixed. The brake warning light never has worked in the car. The light is at the top center of the dash board, which means that it's totaly impossible to get at the back of the light because it's obstructed by the combination of the radio and the windshield wiper motor.

So lacking anything constructive to do with the car, I'm try to get at that light, so that I can test it directly and check its connections. I got the wiper assembly loose, but it won't quite come out; the radio is blocking it. Here's the situation:


This photo is taken leaning over the right fender, looking at roughly the center of the dash board at the back of the luggage compartment. On the left is the glove box. Down at the right the gold thing is the outside part of the fuel level sensor which is in the top of the fuel tank. Most of the wiring is off the picture to the right. At the top center of the photo the grey cylinder is the wiper motor. Right below the wiper motor is the radio, which keeps the wiper motor from being removed. So I need to de-wire it and take it out.

I stopped there this evening, because it seems that the radio is spliced in:


Although--it occurec to me that maybe the beetles radios were spliced in by stock, rather than having connectors like the rest of the electrical system? Given that every other blessed connection in the car has a spade terminal, I would very much have thought that stock radios would have them too...but there's no reference to the radio in the wiring diagrams that I can see. So maybe the official installation method involved cutting wires.

So the next time I work on it, I need to document where those wires go and what they connect to, and only THEN take the radio out.

checkmate

The items came today to finally hook up the Sirius radio to the Taurus radio.

Here's the Sirius Direct FM adapter and two cables to adapt the Ford connectors to normal and back to Ford-style that I got from Crutchfield:





Here they are, the radio finally connected:


You'll notice that you can't see the interface box for the adapter in this photo. That's because the people that designed the adapter assumed that the radion connection was in the front of the car too, so the cable that goes from the adapter to the Sirius radio cradle is only 6 feet long. The only place where all the wires reach is when the box is next to the back seat.

That was my "garage" work for today. Upstairs work consisted of putting shelves in the closet so that we don't have a giant pile of random hats/scarves/gloves and can't find any that match.

Sunday I put cardboard flaps on the doors in the garage to help block cold air from coming in.

radio endgame

Now that I know where the radio connection is, I ordered the hardware to patch the Sirius radio into the car. Principly I need the direct FM adampter from Sirius, but also two adapters to adapt Ford's non-standard antenna connector to it. Both pieces of hardware should arrive next week.

For now, I disconnected the cable from the car's normal antenna and I taped the transmitter wire from the Siriuc car kit across the antenna jack on the radio box in the trunk. It works really well; we haven't heard any static at all on it. However, we can't listen to terrestrial radio with the current setup.





At the bottom right corner of the radio box is the antenna input connector. Just to the left of it is a long, multi-pin connector with no cord connected to it. That's where an optional trunk CD changer plugs in when it's installed.

The water heater is in the basement!

Real progress on the Sirus radio thing today. It occured to me today that perhaps there is a pre-made piece of wiring harness that interfaces to the wiring in the Taurus to connect the Sirius radio the way I want. So while we were in Knoxville today, I stopped by some stores to try to find such a thing. The only really helpful visit was to Circuit City, who had that general kind of thing, but not for our year of car. One piece of information I took away from that store was a brand name of car stero connection equipment, Axxess.

That didn't quite get me what I want, so I started looking first for our model, and then for the piece of equipment that we needed. I came across installer.com, which didn't have something that said it was for a 2006 Taurus, but did have a widget for a 2005 Taurus, called a FRDR-AUX. That page seems like it's for our car, but the diagram of the radio shows an antenna jack, which our radio doesn't have in the dash unit, which is why I'm looking for this product in the first place. I'm also suspicious, because the instructions talk about 13 and 14 pin connectors, and the connector on the back of the radio that I saw looked like 20 pins to me.

Logjamelectronics.com also has a FRDR-AUX available, which actually mentions the 2006 Taurus, so we're in luck! No more diagrams and no more information, though.

The problem with these two advertisements is that they say their adapter plugs into the data connector on the radio that would normally go to an auxilliary CD changer. We don't have a CD changer, but there's also no empty connectors on the back of the radio. Something doesn't add up.

Still thrashing around, I finally find it available at the manufacturer's web site. It's more expensive there, no surprise. They have an installation diagram, which contains a crucial piece of information that I hadn't found anywhere else: REAR MOUNTED TUNER AMPLIFIER PACK.

So the heart of the radio is in the trunk, which is why the radio in the dash board didn't have the right connectors and didn't make any sense--it's just the head unit.






And here are the connectors:



Now that I know where the bloody radio is, this job will be much more straightforward.

didn't used to make them like that

I had another grumpy old man moment this evening.

I got the radio extracting tools to work on our Ford. The trick is to slide the tools in until they engage, then push the handle parts to the outside. This evening I managed to get the radio/environmental control assembly out of the car:





The way that radios used to be made was the back had separate connectors for power in, speakers, standby power (for the clock), and the antenna connection was a separate coaxial connection, sort of like this one that I got off of an old radio:


That's what the Sirius FM adapter is designed to work with.

Well, the Ford Motor Company doesn't want to make this process easy. The connector for the radio is a proprietary pin connector with no separated antenna connection:


So I'm going to have to be clever.