Hey gents,
Its been a long time since I've really been active with the mods, but recently I've been doing a lot of radio work. I had T1806 for a YEARS with AUX (Mine didn't come wired for that so I cut the AUX harness out of a junked scion) and loved it. But recently I wanted to experiment with USB and/or bluetooth. Well I went with the T1819, which was a little more expensive than I wanted. I cut some corners with the USB harness by getting a cheaper solution through ebay, but was really happy with the results. However, I've always wanted steering wheel controls but have always been concerned with price and messing with the airbag. Well turns out if you're a little adventurous, steering wheel controls can cost you as little as 30 bucks and a dremel.
If you're in the odd situation as me and you have an upgraded OEM radio with a separate aux harness, you will have to de-pin the stock harness and add the wires into the aux harness you're using. Just place the wires in the exact same hole.
Otherwise, the wiring is already in there.
Here's the one I bought.
Here's some pics of the install.
I did the cutting with a dremel. I traced the body of the controls with a piece of paper essentially and cut it out using it as a guide, and then I kinda eyeballed towards the bottom, which in retrospect was not the best idea.
Here's the finished product. Again, its not as beautiful as if I had bought the airbag or cover, but that would have been between 115-300 bucks. And my truck is 10years old now. And she's got a couple dings here and there, so this is a little more character
. I may however cut a sliver off the block I have left and fill in those gaps. We'll see, it doesn't really bother me. But there you go.
For those interested in the 'how to' here are the general steps. All in all, it was about an hour.
1. Take the negative terminal off the battery to avoid the airbag giving you a very bad day while you're working.
2. Not on the column, but on the steering wheel itself there are 2 latches on the sides. One is actually where the cruise control bar sticks out of. Pop those off and you'll see a silver torx screw in each side. Undo those. In my truck they were torqued down by a gorilla, so I ended up putting the torx bit in like a 5mm socket or whatever it fit in and used a ratchet to get it out.
3. Lift the airbag cover out and place it on top of the steering column. I didn't unplug anything, I just placed it on top and worked on it while it was tethered by the connector.
4. The harness that comes on the steering wheel controls pretty much already exists inside the steering wheel. I unplugged those 2 connectors and replaced them with the steering wheel control harness. The last connecter was a slide on one that goes on the back of the airbag. Again, the car already has one on there, just slide that one off, and slide the new one on.
5. Do your cutting
6. Put it back together, reconnect the battery.
here's the usb/aux input. I cut one of the blanks, and glued the sliver with some jb weld to the end to make it fit the slot.
Linear Mode
