The Day After the Drive-In

So, after all of that chaos about getting a radio the stars finally aligned and I was able to get together with my brilliant electrician friend, Ben. Seeing that the Hurricane was a bust we Jerusalem and I were able to drive down to my friend's house to take a look at the junkyard radio I had purchased.

I can do basic wiring. I can wire house electrical bits, and I can read and draw basic circuit diagrams. That said, I am not an electrician, and when I plugged in the radio and it didn't work I was FUBARed. I am glad that I had help.

With Ben telling me what to do I managed to splice and dice enough wires to figure out a solution. First we had no power, so we checked the fuses. We couldn't find the right fuse so we checked them all. In this process the fuse to the radio turned out to be ok, but I did manage to replace the fuse going to my broken air conditioner. I hope that fixed that little issue.

With all of the fuses checked we determined that power was our only real issue. We fiddled around with the green wire, which gave us power when the car was on, and the pink wire, which was supposed to give us power all the time. The pink one must have been broken somewhere along the line. We got the radio working with the green wire, but because it was not constant power we kept on having the radio shut down.

Ben's brilliant electrianness suggested that we take the power from the 4-way flasher button which did have constant power. At once I stripped the wires and ran the radio off of the 4-ways. Success... well... almost success.

The radio was now working, but working in the sense that there was lights and it said "code." "Code," as it turned out was the radio asking for the password to be unlocked. In our awesomeness we guessed some passwords and managed to lock out the radio. Uh... great. Anyways... it appeared to be working, it was just locked out.

Google helped us find a solution to our anti-theft issue, and we thought we had the radio situation figured out. Well... we did. I headed home after we put Jerusalem's front end back together and when I got home I left the key in and on the accessories position. One hour later the radio was locked. One hour and one minute later I put in the code from Google and for the first time since our meeting, Jerusalem made music...

p.s. The clock was still broken, but just recently I got a piece of wire and added the clock into the parallel circuit. It too now works, now Jerusalem has music and time... oh man this is getting good. Hopefully after tomorrow I will be able to take the rope off of the bumper soon!!!

p.p.s. The bumper is fixed, my pet spider is fine, and Waldo is yet to be found...