continuing on from earlier, I have transferred all of the power components (windows/mirrors/locks) from my donor EX civic, into my little red hatch... and nothing worked!
Ok, so has to be a fuse, or a relay, or a loose connection, or a bad ground, or... unknown...
Let’s rule some things out!
I’ve been driving without a stereo for some months now because the doors had no connection to the car after swapping the under-dash harness, so even if I had a head unit there would be no speaker connection. So I installed the radio and tested now that the door wiring harnesses were connected to the dash wiring harness.
And hazah! the speakers work. So I’m confident that the connections of the wiring harness between the chassis and through the door is good. But to confirm I did a continuity test either side of the plugs and they were good.
That the speakers worked, which have their own grounding, I am now mostly leaning towards a missed or bad ground for the door harness being the root cause of my problems.
So I got under the dash and started poking around. My helper mostly just babbled, she didn’t know nuthin’ bout wiring and was kind of no help at all!
oooookay, what’s this then? a random loose connector. And it has splicing from the prior alarm that I removed. Probably has something to do with door locks then?
so I got lost in a world of online how-tos, wiring diagrams, and fuse box images. But no help, and could find no home for it
ahuh! a how-to finally identified this connector AND... I dont need it, and it’s unrelated.
so I just undid everything under that side of the dash, took out the fuse box and really started double checking everything
no driver’s seat and fuse box on the floor is at least good anti-theft #CivicOwnershipIsConstantlyThinkingAboutTheft
Ok, I’m losing my mind. Perhaps lets go find that alarm wiring I removed and double check there isn’t a relay or something I missed.
In trying to find the alarm in my storage area I came to realise everything was a mess, so I pulled it all out and sorted and threw away some things and reorganised everything.
Ok ok ok, well I NEED my car for daily driving, so let’s make a quick tool just in case come monday I haven’t solved my power window issue and need to wind em down. So I found a cheap cigarette power outlet USB adapter in my box of things (I have many man boxes of many many thing) and threw away its inards
and replaced them with a straight wire a few feet long so I can just jam em into the open socket on my unfinished door and window goes up, and window goes down
I still think my wiring issue is a bad ground, I just can’t find it. But I also have a centre brake light that’s not working, and plans to redo my headliner, and I noticed that behind my plastics are dirty, and I need to lay some sound deadening in the doors might as well put it other places. So...
I distracted myself (or rather, I worked on other things while my mind thought about solutions to my wiring problem) by stripping out the interior.
I’ll be doing a custom headliner, laying in sound deadening, and installing a custom centre console (when some more ebay parts arrive) before putting the interior back in. It’ll be loud, and hot in there until then, but at least I have a radio now :D
Ok, so last item on my desires for the week was to finally replace the trunk lock so that all 4 locks on my car match a single key so I can stop carrying two
and of COURSE the 95 EX coupe donor’s lock cylinder doesn’t match the 93 VX hatch’s
fine, no problem. I’ll just swap the pins over so the locks gets to stay with the car they are designed for, but the keys will work the other way around.
but. of COURSE it isn’t that simple. nothing this week has been :S
the design of the lock cylinders differs slightly internally. The end of the cylinder on one is open and allows the key to be inserted slightly deeper (lenny face)
Which means although the pins are correct, the key isn’t being aligned properly and thus not lining the pins up so the lock doesn’t turn
~ARROWED~ DREMELED!
It’s not perfect, and now both locks require a little jiggling to work. But it’s fine. Both cars have a single key, and it’s the trunk lock on both that’s janky. For the most part that is opened using the lever next to the driver’s seat.
Summary: I’m bad at all things. But I soldiered on and just did other things instead.
Pupper tax
