I've had my Empeg for close to 5 year now and finally it's in a car!

I intented do do this from day one but never reaaly got round to it with the first car, this was replaced with a car that had a listenable dtadard stereo with changer in it (Peug 406) so never got round to it then either. That car broke down in a spectecular way and now I'm arguing with the garage over the repair, but that's a different story...

Anyway, bought a '99 Opel Vectra to take its place for the time being but that came without its OEM unit.

Spend an entire day building it in; had to remove glove compartment box, tunnel cover and loads of other things for tha cabling and to install the power amplifier (an old 4-channel Nakamichi; still superb!) under the seat.

Pitfalls? Of course ignition sense and 12V permanent were switched around from the standard ISO standard. Running power cable to poweramp was a chore (even had to remove windshield wipers!).

The steering wheel controls were reversed at first (up was down, both for volume and tracks) but that was easily sorted in config.ini.
The Autoleads bits work perfectly by the way...

Next thing to do is the speakers, as they are well and truly crap. Hmmmm, nice Dynaudios....

My little Karma will fuulifill the role the Empeg did at home, but I can foresee having to buy a second Empeg....
Anyway, I'm a happy chappy now.

Please...don't just tease...how 'bout some install porn.

I *think* I live in a pretty safe and secure neighbourhood in a nice, sleepy, provincial town in Holland. The car is right outside and fitted with a pretty good alarm system (previous owner was a Siemens engineer who drove around with loads of valuable stuff).

But... I take you point, I'll make a habit of it of taking out of the car when I'm home, but I need an excuse to get a second Empeg.

BTW, many thanks for Hijack; it's f-ing brilliant!!!

All that extra work was just to make up for the lack of installing it in the first two cars.

I have the same car as you and I also used the Autoloads harness for the steering wheel controls. My amplifier is fairly small so I have it wrapped in foam so that it sits firmly behind the glovebox without rattling. I also wrapped the tuner and other bulky items in foam to prevent them from rattling too and it works pretty well.

I installed a sub in the boot and it was relatively straightforward. I removed the footwell kick panel and the plastic sill cover along the length of car to install the wiring. The tricky part was routing the cabling between the inner rear wheelarch and the cosmetic plastic covering.

Quote:
The steering wheel controls were reversed at first (up was down, both for volume and tracks) but that was easily sorted in config.ini.
The Autoleads bits work perfectly by the way...

I've always assumed that there may be a fault with my Autoloeads adapter. Basically, only 2 of the 6 steering wheel buttons reliably return codes for a long button press. It seems to take about 1 second for the analogue voltage to stabilize when making a long press. To get to the stage where 4 of the 6 buttons worked reliably, I had to add a load resistor and a stabilizing capacitor. Of course, I have to use custom hex button codes to map the buttons to empeg functions.

I kindof regret buying the Autoleads adaptor 2nd hand from eBay, I guess that I should go and buy a new one and see what difference that makes - after all, I presume that I can simply return it if it makes no difference.

My amplifier is fairly small so I have it wrapped in foam so that it sits firmly behind the glovebox

Unless you are running a Class T amplifier, I would be concerned about overheating in that environment.

Have you ever checked the temperature of the amplifier after it has been running for five or six hours?

tanstaafl.