Well, I pulled about 45 lbs worth of stereo amplifier and associated crapola out of the back of the Z today.  The previous installation was… decent.  The only problem was adjustability post installation.  There was no way to change anything once installed.  All the wires were completely concealed and couldn’t be re-tightened without removing the whole setup, which took me the better part of 5 hours.  But now that it’s out, all the rattles from the back end of the car are gone.  That in itself was worth the effort! I’ll take a picture of all the junk I pulled out later, but at least it’s done.

Oh, and I hooked up two little 6.5″ Polk Audio coaxial speakers in place of the LPF 6.5″ Boston acoustics that were in the middle headrest bar.  MUCH BETTER!

No tags

So I spent most of the day replacing the driver’s side headlamp housing on my Z.  What a pain in the butt.  Apparently the headlamps on the car had been converted to HIDs.  Cool right?

Not so much.

See, the headlamp housings I purchased (JDM style black outlines) don’t support the HID bulb and ballast.  I thought, “no biggie, I’ll just modify it so it fits.” Well, that didn’t go so well either.  The housings within the headlamps are completely different.  I ended up cracking the igniter wire’s insulated housing next to the bulb.  No clue if it will still work…

Ultimately, I chopped up the wire harness of each housing, and spliced them together as necessary to make it work.  All good now, and the left lamp housing is in.

Oh, and the car has been in a small crash before I purchased it.  The front left corner is pushed in a little.  The fender doesn’t line up with an OEM lamp housing, the plastic mounting tabs were broken off the HID housing, and all the mounts on the chassis were bent backward.  I wouldn’t have a problem with this if I had been told about it, but finding out the hard way sucks.  I probably would have bought a new fender and put it on at the same time just to make everything kosher.  Instead, I ended up palm-slapping the fender into the appropriate shape around the headlamp. It still looks fine, but dammit, this is my [almost] perfect car.

+150 HP, +120 Lb. Ft. of Torque, sunburnt orange, and a non-crunched fender.  Then it’d be perfect.

No tags