|
|
| APEXi S-AFC |
 |
|
First thing you gotta do with this thing is mount it. You can mount it however you want, but I mounted it below my radio, where a CD player or something would go if I gave half a shit about car audio! My suggestion would be to get some mounting tabs and stick the damn thing wherever you want. I used about eight of them to hold this onto the plastic of the radio box, and I'm pretty sure it's not going anywhere for a WHILE. Before you actually stick the AFC onto the box, you're gonna want to run the wires out the back. To get at the box, you have to take off the front fascia of the center "control module". It is released by two tabs, in equivalent locations on either side of the center control module. You can see the location of one of the push pins here. The other one is directly across in the passenger side footwell. They're just about impossible to get out, and I broke BOTH of them, so I have no tips for you whatsoever on that issue. Fuck it. Just pull them out of break them off. Get more later. After they're both off, you can pull off the front fascia as shown to the right. Be sure not to tear out any wires that might be connected to it, like the rear defroster wires. You will now be able to pop the box right out of it's place in the radio console. Drill a hole in the back of the box, near the corner, so you can feed the wires from the S-AFC down into the driver's side footwell and across under the steering column to the PCM. If you don't have a drill, you can punch a lot of holes in it with a nail and hammer. That's what I did. The hole is ragged and ugly, but who cares? Not I, biatchezzzz! After you feed the wires out the back of the box, pull them through the mess of electronics in the space behind the radio and down into the footwell. You'll have to take off a piece of plastic held into the right wall of the driver's footwell to grab the wires and feed them through. It's held on by a piece of velcro. It's removal is described on the Short Shifter page in the fourth paragraph. Once you have the wires fed into the footwell, drag them across to the left side of the driver's footwell. The wires should come out approximately here.
|
Next up is the hard shit: actually wiring up the device. It's not really that hard, though. If you stick your head under the dash in front of the steering wheel, you'll see a silver box with three or so blue and brown connectors going into it, each of which has like a million fucking wires going to it. The view should look something like the picture to the right. In my car there were two blue ones and one brown one. Don't mess with the brown ones. Before removing the blue connectors, unscrew the negative battery connection so you don't fry the PCM or S-AFC. Now, to remove the connectors (a.k.a. wiring harnesses), you have to squeeze the tabs on either side of it pretty damn hard and wiggle the motherfuck out of it. Wiggling back and forth and side to side and pulling really hard will eventually pop them out. I thought I was doing it wrong, but it ended up that I just wasn't pulling hard enough. As one commenter noted, "They're not made to come out accidentally." Exactly. Once you have them out, you'll notice one is bigger than the other. If you go somewhere else for directions and they mention the "J2" connector, it's the small one. The bigger one is called "J1". Now comes the "fun" part...wiring. There are seven wires from the S-AFC that you need to connect to the PCM. I've made up a table for you that lists the wire color from the S-AFC, what color wire on what connector it needs to be spliced into, and what color the wires are that are closest to the wire of interest on the left and right. Some colors of wires are duplicated on a certain harness, so make sure you match up not only the color of the wire that you're plicing into, but also the ones around it. To splice into a wire, strip the PCM wire so about a 1/2" of copper is showing. Then, separate the copper strands inside the wire so it makes a hole through which you'll stick the stripped end of the S-AFC wire. Then, wrap the copper of the S-AFC wire around the copper of the PCM wire, make sure it's a solid connection, and wrap it all up in electrical tape.
|
Now that you have everything wired up, go to http://www.saturnspeed.com/safc_setup.php and follow the directions there to set up your S-AFC so you can start the engine safely. Once everything is working properly, take it for a drive and it'll look something like this. Pretty, ain't it? Yayuh.
|
|
|
|
|
|
