In a previous post I wrote about the adventure of tracking down and buying a used car. I also pointed out that a used car can also hide some interesting treasures that are waiting discover under the seats and within the nooks and crannies of the trunk. Hopefully, the used car buyer has enough information to sleuth out any serious mechanical defects and use that information as negotiating leverage. One of the clues to potential electrical problems is if the original factory stereo has been replaced.
I recently purchased a 1990 Honda Prelude for my teenaged son. The car met all of my criteria: it was clean, well care for and never been in an accident. The only fault I could find with the car was that the original factory stereo had been removed and replaced with a Pioneer unit with a detachable face, a CD drive and the ability to drive a separate amplifier, a sub-woofer driver and an equalizer function. Before sale, someone had removed the sub-woofer and amp but had thoughtfully left the wiring behind.
Unfortunately, the extra functions of the Pioneer stereo were buried in a menu tree that requires scrolling through several options in an LCD display. The space let over for the radio station preset buttons was very small and the tiny buttons were hard to stab with clumsy fingers while driving. The fatal blow to the Pioneer stereo was that the AM reception was very poor; after consultation with the car’s primary user (my son) it was decided to replace the Pioneer stereo with an OEM Honda AM/FM/CD unit I had in storage. The OEM Honda units are actually excellent stereos and many people foolishly discard them thinking that an expensive aftermarket stereo must certainly be a better unit. It is possible to buy an OEM Honda unit for next to nothing from a source like eBay and I have upgraded many Hondas with cast off OEM stereos that feature CD players.
The first challenge is to get the old Pioneer stereo out of the dashboard. Honda normally secures their radio with a singe Philips head screw that is easily accessible by reaching under from the passenger foot well. But most aftermarket stereo installer use a sleeve device the wraps around the unit that they are installing and then wedges itself into the dash, defying removal and this was the method employed by the guy who installed the Pioneer. A sleeve is a fast and easy way to install a new stereo and but it is not a sign that the rest of the installation job was done with care or thought.
I managed to pry out the old Pioneer unit with out doing any damage to the stereo being removed or the surrounding dashboard. But what I found behind the stereo within the dash nearly broke my heart. Rather than use an adapter to allow the Pioneer stereo to be easily plugged into the Honda’s wiring harness, the installer had cut away the Honda’s pre-wired plug and cobbled together a splice in every single wire in the 16 wire loom. So the car was left with a Pioneer plug that fits into the back of the Pioneer stereo and I had a Honda stereo with a completely different plug interface. And never the twain shall meet.
Rather than making a long trip to the junkyard to cut a Honda stereo plug out of a wrecked hulk, I ran to my local Best Buy stereo installation shop and bought a “Reverse Harness.� This is a Honda plug that comes with wiring guide and instructions for restoring the car’s wiring to allow an OEM Honda stereo to be installed.
Carefully I cut away the Pioneer plug from the car’s wiring harness and then I patiently rewired each of the leads in the new Reverse Harness so that the OEM stereo could be installed back in the car. I used a set of wiring crimps and a proper crimping tool so that the job went surprisingly fast and smoothly. I finished the rewiring and test the stereo before loading it into the dashboard. Surprisingly, I had managed to get every connection correct and the unit worked on the first try. Insuring that all the connections were solid, I slid the OEM Honda stereo into the dashboard and set all of the radio presets.
With the replacement of the stereo my son’s Prelude is now a solid, dependable and fun car to drive with great sounds. I only hope that as an inexperienced driver that he does not wrap this sweet car around a tree.