new car in pieces

The Subaroo is dead, long live the Subaroo! :-)

My old Outback reached its use-by date and got progressively less reliable over the last three months - no huge surprise after 14 years and 215000km - and I decided to get me something slightly new_er_.

After a bit of mental to and fro I ditched the idea of buying a real 4WD toy (I had looked at 2007+ Mitsubishi Triton dual cabs as an option), and bought another Suby, this time a 2006 Forester X. The old car I traded in - for a pittance, but likely just in time before it would have fallen apart.

Me being me the first thing I did after bringing the car home was to search for the workshop manual (3600 pages of pdf), which is as usual pretty precise and really helpful.

The second thing I did was to tear things apart :-) The Forester came with the original factory radio (pretty lousy) and needed to make way for a transplant from the old car.

You know you've got a modern car when you need a spudger (and knowhow of the many hidden catches) more than a screwdriver:

To get to the radio the center bezel/fascia has to come off, which requires the removal of the lower fascia to reach two screws, then some judicious spudger use and gentle pulling - but before you can start pulling, it is necessary to disconnect the HVAC control cables (this being the basic model with manual HVAC controls, which I much prefer over Hal 9000), which requires either a contortionist with tiny fingers or the disassembly of both knee boards, which requires disassembly of the glove box and the driver-side lower panel, which...

Once you have a substantial part of the dashboard in pieces then you can loosen four screws, fiddle the radio frame out of its recess and replace the radio.

 new car in pieces new car in pieces phone holder

Quite a bit later I had mounted the radio (twice, the first time I used the wrong set of mounting holes and the face panel was not flush but
too far in...) and also fabricated a simple phone holder.

[ published on Sun 15.12.2013 13:01 | filed in interests | ]
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