Stereo Overhaul

Ok.  This is kind of a fun story to tell.  Some of you know that Dallas' truck got broken into at the beginning of this year.  They broke the little wing window.....at least they didn't bust out the big one because it only cost us $35 to replace the wing.  Not too shabby. Anywhoo, they stole our battery jumper cable/charger thing that was really handy and we really miss it, and they stole the faceplate for his stereo and used a crowbar to try to pry the stereo out of the dash.  So for the last 5 months or so he has been driving around music-less.  Poor, poor dallas..... 

Here is a picture of the busted out window

And here is the damaged stereo.  Pretty messed up huh?  So the other day he was looking on ebay at the Property Room site and found the EXACT same stereo that he had.  The best part was that it was only $15.00!!  Woo! So he put in a bid and ended up winning.  We went and picked it up on Tuesday, and spent the rest of our morning installing it.  I never knew all that went into installing a stereo.  It is quite the ordeal.

This is just a picture of the new faceplate

Apparently, for those of you who don't know, you have to take out the whole dash to put the stereo in.  (We probably didn't need to take out the part under the steering wheel, but we also used this as an opportunity to clean the insides of the truck.  It had accumulated a lot, and I mean A LOT of dust and dirt from all of his wheeling excursions.)

When we plugged in the new stereo to see if it worked, this popped out!  Free CD!  Only, it was this really obnoxious mexican music and not a good find at all.  But we both died laughing when we saw what it was labeled, and then laughed even harder when we heard what was on it.

Here's where things got complicated.  The new stereo we bought played CD's, but wouldn't pick up the radio stations.  This did not satisfy Dallas.  So we tinkered around with it a bit to see if we could get the connection to work.  We finally did get it working, but it would only play one station, no matter what setting we set it to.  So then he thought, no big deal, we can fix this.  We started taking both stereos apart to see if we could find something connected in one of them that wasn't in the other.  That way maybe we could fix the problem.   These pictures are of us hard at work trying to figure out how to fix whatever was wrong.  And yes, I did just as much work as Dallas!  Taking things apart....putting them back together.  It was fun! 

In the end what we decided to do was use the old stereo that was originally in the truck, but we took the faceplate and the piece that the faceplate connects to off the new stereo and put it on the old one.  We knew that the old stereo played the radio, and also played CDs.  However, the piece that the faceplate connects to got all mangled when the moron tried to steal it.  So we used the good parts from the new stereo, and hooked it up to the old motherboard.  And in the end......TADA!!!!

It worked!!  Oh!  I need it to go on record that it was my idea to use the new pieces with the old stereo.  Dallas was just going to deal with only listening to the one radio station.  Good thing he married such a good woman! HA! 

Anyway, it was a pretty fun project to work on together.