Retrofitting an old car…

For a full week I worked on my daughter’s car and installed what’s called a CarPlay device that she can use with her i-Phone. That part was easy. What wasn’t was to try to use an Auxiliary port that wasn’t available in that vehicle manufactured in 2003. 

So I attempted to buy an adapter for that, but after receiving it, when I opened up the baseboard of the auto, I realized that there was no connector, so I had to use an FM station, so the car radio to communicate with the auto’s audio system to do the job. Count about 2-3 days of research and repeated work for that. Then the next stage was to install a reverse camera, always a nice safety feature to have in a car.

That’s where the big job came up as the car was a station wagon and the camera eye had to be part of the opening rear hatch of the car. That involved circulating the cable from the dashboard over the front and rear door (that part was very easy) but became complicated as I had to start removing some roof panels and entirely strip open up the hatch door from its own panels. 

Most of these panels are snapped into the body, but there are screws in places I didn’t know. Further, our garage is extremely cold now, so I was expecting that the plastic components, almost a quarter of a century old, combined with my garage freezing temperatures might break some of the retaining snaps or break right into pieces. 

Then I had to channel the pesky small, but big enough camera through holes that couldn’t allow it through (I would have to cut into the steel for that), so after four more days of struggle, repeated operation and more soul-searching, I simply gave up (for the moment), especially since that wasn’t my own auto and I didn’t want to make a mess of it. 

Sometimes, you need to know when to quit and this time was particularly hard because I had developed a strong liking for the project and invested so much of my precious time into it!