Tonight I removed the rear Japanese illuminated EL plate panel and fixed the wiring where the panel had been hacked in. It involved removing two wires that were connected using red Scotchlok™ type things and soldering some new wire onto the chopped red wire.
It’s now as good as new and I have two working number plate lights.
Firstly I’d just like to point out that I have no idea if the problem with the wires was caused by me soldering them, or just cheap shonky wire. The wire was breaking down a good 6 inches from where I had soldered them.
This was a set of audio cables to convert Nissan Micra to ISO plugs. Because of the restricted room behind my double-DIN head unit I unclipped the pins from the ISO connectors and connected them to the head unit harness wires with solder and heatshrink.
While I was soldering one wire I noticed that it just came away from the pin with next to no tugging or wiggling. When I tried to strip the insulation back the wire was very brittle and powdery and just seemed to crumble. I replaced this wire with some from an old Skyline engine wiring loom and that was fine.
I put the harness in the vehicle tonight and found I was only getting audio from the right channel. That’s odd, and annoying. I immediately thought of the dodgy wire and wondered if there might be more. I got my meter out and started testing continuity…to find four wires with no connection.
Each wire I replaced was all powdery and was breaking up. The harness that came with the head unit was perfect with clean bright copper wire. The dodgy wires weren’t even copper colour.
Here’s the item. I strongly suggest avoiding this one.
I thought the sub woofer wasn’t working properly as there was more tapping coming from it than real sound. I took the covers off to find pretty much what I was expecting:
From what I’ve read finding a replacement would be very hard so I’ve ordered a re-foam kit which should hopefully bring it back to life again.
As the bus hasn’t been converted to KMH I decided rather than fit a converter chip I’d just buy a replacement fascia that reads in MPH. This way the computer isn’t being fooled into thinking it’s travelling at a different speed.
I’ve seen two types on Ebay; Lockwood and some other cheap version. Unfortunately the cheap version is just that and from pictures I’ve seen the light diffusion is pretty poor. You can see the LEDs through it. I bought Lockwood.
Fitting was easy until I got to removing the needles. I tried to put all of the needles at 6 o’clock after pulling out the stop pins. I then levered them off carefully with a forked spudger. After the needles were off I peeled the old fasia off.
The new fascia doesn’t come with any adhesive and I had no thin double-sided tape anywhere, so I used superglue. BIG mistake. It eats through the printing and has left dark marks in the dials.
Anyway, I got the needles back on and put the dash back together. It all works fine from what I’ve tested so far. I just hope I got the needles back in about the right angles!