I am going to put some effort into necromancing my thread.
I hate cords hanging around on the dash. You might have noticed the possibly unnecessary effort I put into my ScangaugeII mount. I am more than happy to waste that time and energy on these little things that only I will notice, providing I have the time and energy to spare. My GPS cord was annoying me. I had it stretched out under and around the side of the dash so it wouldn’t be so visible. This was not good enough, so I did what any reasonable person would do.
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I made a hole in the dash behind where the GPS goes. Then I cut the cord about 12” back from the end, and heat shrink crimped it back together. Now the end is always where I want it.
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Since I can shove the cord in and out, when the GPS is not being run, I just push the length back in the dash. When sitting in the seat, it's not really noticeable. The next few times I turned on the defrost I got to enjoy a facefull of plastic debris blowing out the vents. If I did it again I would cover them.
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So that’s all well and good, but how do I power it? Before, I got the power from the cigarette lighter, err, 12v power port. That always worked fine, so let us steal a watt or two off of that. In order to hide how hack this vehicle is, we need to keep the wiretapping hidden. I have a few of these little deals that allow you to use a split off a spade connector.
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I added the heat shrink to insulate, using some color to signify positive and negative. They fit on the 12v port perfectly!
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OK, so I can just cut off the plug, and plug in the device with the spade connectors? Nope! Turns out, there is a bunch of electrical doodads and widgets in the plug, doing capacitance or inductance or turning Microfarads into Henries. I didn’t want to mess with that so I cut down the plastic as small as I could so I could hide it back in the dash. I had to keep some of the plastic to protect the small board from being beaten up, lest the coulombs break loose.
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Now I can just plug it in to the 12v power, and enjoy my cord free environment.