Project: Honda Accord Radio Replacement

My brother-in-law is the antithesis of a carguy. For him a car is an appliance designed to get him from point A to point B, reliably and at a low cost. He therefore drives a Honda Accord LX, an ’04 model, now with 140,000 miles. He will run into the ground and then promptly replace it with a similar vehicle. He keeps up on maintenance religiously, but sometimes things just stop working. One day, the display on his radio went out. After that the radio would come on and off intermittently.

My initial suggestion to him was  to replace that radio with an identical OEM factory unit off eBay because I hate aftermarket radios:

• they look like crap in the dash
• they are full of tiny buttons
• the display is horrid, designed by a seventeen-year-old
• the user interface sucks
• they’re all the same, no manufacturer offers a simple effin radio

In order to be fair to him, I also suggested an aftermarket option after explaining the above. He liked the idea of satellite radio and Bluetooth, so that’s what we went with. Yes, I could have tried to retrofit a radio from an ’05 Accord EX which had XM but would it work? Would I be successful? And how much would it cost? No one knew.

I placed a phone call to Cruthfield and ordered a cheap radio with the features I wanted, a satellite receiver, some satellite converter and a free installation kit. Cruthfield threw in a free CD changer (I don’t know why, it’s in the garage, still in box) and free shipping.

The mounting kit has become an issue right away. The free kit places the aftermarket radio very low in the center console and makes you give up a very handy storage bin. With this kit, the OEM radio remains in the dash, not connected to anything, sitting there useless.  Reason for that is because the HVAC controls are integrated into the radio. I did not like that solution and got on the horn with Cruthfield again.

I ordered the $90 mounting kit which places the after-market radio where the OEM radio was and has HVAC controls which mimic the factory ones. This raised a flag with me because I was convinced that the cheap after-market HVAC controls won’t work right. And as we’ll find out soon I was right, but went along with the install anyway.

To remove the broken HVAC controls/radio unit I had to remove a good chunk of the lower console. At first it took a while, but after the fifth (yes, read on) time it proved to be a three minute job.

Wiring was rather painless but I had to call Crutchfield support (which is excellent by the way) about the illumination wire as the installation kit and the radio manual had different names for it (illumination and dimmer). Then I got to the blue wire which was “power antenna” wire. Pfft, I don’t need that! The antenna in the Accord is built into the rear window. Snip! I soldered up all the other wires and taped them into a semi-neat bundle.

The dash kit needed the OEM harness to be plugged into it and one wire connected to it. There was also a detailed procedure on how to “program” it; put the ignition on, press a button, turn off and pray. Wow, everything worked the first time, the radio and the climate controls! Holly crap! Ok, I install everything permanently, screw the whole console back together, and ta-da, I am D-O-N-E, done!

Yea, right.

After subsequent test, I found the climate control to be not working. On the horn with Crutchfield again; they couldn’t really help me because I followed instructions to the T and even repeated the whole procedure with them on the phone. Here is the problem; once “programmed” it would work fine but would go back to being finicky once you turned the car off and back on again. It had to be reprogrammed each time the car was started but reprogramming it meant disconnecting it from constant power and, you guessed it, taking apart the dash. In my brilliance I just pulled the fuse each time. However, pulling the fuse every time you started the car was clearly not the solution for daily driving.

Cruchfield called the yahoos that made the kit and called me back. The yahoos were actually on a three-way phone conference now. I repeated the exact programming steps I have now performed half a dozen times without success, but with one exception. The yahoos told me to press-and-hold the AC button before turning the ignition on, a step which was clearly absent from the manual. Whatta ya know, it worked!

Two weeks go by. My brother-in-law calls me and says that he is not getting any AM reception. Huh? WTF? First of all, how are you not getting any AM reception? And second, who the hell still listens to AM radio? Evidently Jim is one of the four people who still listen to AM radio and it is clearly not working.

Hmm… yea. I know why it wasn’t working but I needed confirmation, so I make another phone call to my good friends at Crutchfield. By now I knew them well enough to know their first names and schedules. Eric confirmed that the blue “power antenna” wire is in fact used to power up the AM antenna amplifier which is needed in lieu of having a mast.

Sonofa!!! Ripped the dash apart again. Removed the radio/HVAC clusterfuck. Took out the wiring harness and removed the tape. Looked at the harness where I cut of the wire. Crap, it is cut right at the connector. Calmly, I managed to extract the connector from the plug. That was good. I patiently opened the connector, removed whatever wire was there, soldered in a new wire and crimped it again.

I put everything back, again. I went through the HVAC set-up, again. I programmed the radio, again. Everything worked and by some miracle is still working, a year later.  And it still looks like crap.

Many years ago when I left the mechanic shop I used to work at I promised myself that I will never work on cars again. This reaffirmed that idea. Cars suck, I hate them.