I’m having to do this write up in four parts despite the fact that I was about halfway done before I realized I was going to do everything I did on Sunday at one time. I had set aside the weekend of October 6th to tackle this part of the project. Unfortunately, we lost my grandfather last week, and we took Saturday to remember him down in South Florida where he lived. I woke up Sunday and decided in an effort to return to some normalcy, I would wake up, hit a Wawa for breakfast and tackle the big box from Crutchfield that’s been sitting in the corner of the bedroom for what felt like an eternity. (It was really a week and a half.)

I had ordered a Kenwood DDX9904s. I’ll go into why I ordered what I did in another post, but for now, this was what it was all about. I have to say between YouTube and the Crutchfield Ready Harness/Customer Service line and the Idatalink Maestro instructions, the horror that used to be installing a new head unit in a car has gone completely away. Back in the day, the idea of an aftermarket radio conjures up notions of removable faceplates and cheap buttons.

Exactly what I wouldn’t want to see on my dash.

I wanted to go for something that was more integrated into the dash. Unfortunately, with the way the existing radio sits in the dash, that pretty much means replacing the whole center part of the dash. In order to get to the center of the dash, you have to pull off the top and bottom of the driver’s side of the interior. When I first started Sunday morning at 9am, I was just planning on plugging the head unit in and putting the rest of the car together piece by piece. As I pulled the three largest pieces of the dash, and I continue to unbox pieces of cable from each box, I decided well with the whole car apart, I might as well put this and that together. I now had a whole day project head of me.

A crap load of equipment getting loaded in.

I started the project by taking apart the dash. 3 screws. Honda uses 3 screws to hold he whole dash in place. I have a Caravan that uses 15 to hold just the bottom of my dash in place. Its nuts. Once I had this dash apart, I decided I needed to go ahead and install the mic and dash camera. I’ll be doing that as a separate write up in about 2 weeks. I have more I still want to add to it. Right now the mic is dangling from the dome lights. I routed the wiring up from the mirror into the headliner and down the A pillar. Following that I decided to put the SiriusXM antennae on the trunk lid and wire it an the backup camera through the car. At this point, I had the whole drivers side car in pieces. That write up will be Part 2 of this post.

The dash is apart. Now lets see if I remember how to put it back.

This is where confusion sets in. This Kenwood radio has a sleeve that is only necessary to install in some installations. There wasn’t anything the instructions that said it wasn’t necessary and that the provided dash kit could be screwed right into the radio. Also there were a number if wires from Crutchfield’s Ready Harness that were labeled, but it wasn’t clear what they were for. I decided to call their support in about 5 mins, I had my answers. The rest of the install was easy. Easy in that it wasn’t mentally taxing, but it was a TON of manual labor.

All the vents and climate controls from the old dash have to be moved over to the new dash.

Once I got the radio bolted to the new dash I had to be careful not to scratch the new dash as I tried to bring the vents and climate control from the old into the new dash. I have to say for being an aftermarket dash kit, you’d never know the kit wasn’t from Honda. It’s excellent! Thanks to the ready harness service, and the wiring diagram, putting the connections together was a breeze. I only needed the wire cutters and T’s to connect the cameras to a power supply. Since the radio had such good color coded wires, I opted to tie into the ready harness with the cameras. They’ve been functioning well since I did that.

Everything moved over to the new dash with the new radio

I did a test run of the radio just to try it and it didn’t turn on right away, which I later realized was because the connectors weren’t tight enough. After that the radio started playing. I decided at this point to connect the cameras and try to stuff the whole thing into the dash. Trying to get the wiring in the end was a beast. It’s stuffed back there. Honda doesn’t give you a lot of room back there. The Sirius module fit in nicely behind the dash between the radio and the passenger vent, but the wiring for both the radio, the Idatalink and all the other wires made for a tight squeeze back there. I had to keep pushing the Idatalink lower and lower just to get the whole thing to snap back into place.

Rough in installation

It did accomplish that factory look I was going for. I finally wrapped up around 8 pm that same night and was able to drive to work the next morning with everything functioning. I still have a few more odds and ends, but I’ll explain them in the next couple parts of this episode. More photos and a walkthrough of the features will come in about a month. In the meantime, Part 2 of this installation saga will be explained on October 20th.