When you ask your head unit to eject a CD, and rather than doing what you ask it ejects a small plastic cog, it is time for a new one. I’m petty sure that’s impenetrable logic.

My budget was tight. My budget is always tight… I wanted ipod control and I wanted to spend less than $400. So no name ebay job it is!

I received this lovely package some 5 days after ordering. The Hong Kong postal service is quite efficient, then.

Here’s the contents. Lots of wires and stuff.

The unit itself.

As you can see, the unit has been made by those for whom English is a second language…

About 2 minutes in to removing the old unit, it bit me. This is how we do things at Garage Dusty – badly. At Risky Devil they say they run low and dirty. At Garage Dusty we run cut and bloody.

This is after removing all the wiring from the old unit. And there was a lot. I had started to connect the wires from the new unit too. It was at about this time that I started to think maybe I’d be able to do this without setting fire to my shed.

The unit sitting in the dash. For some reason this pic reminds me of Terminator or something.

Installed. The recommended position for the Mitsubishi brackets didn’t really work, as it sat too far out (as you can see in this pic). I bodged up a different mounting point for the brackets (using 1 screw instead of 2 – classy):

And this was the end result. Looks pretty standard doesn’t it?

Fairly happy with it – the touch panel sensitivity isn’t the best and the in-built graphics are a bit crappy, but all in all it is decent value for money. The biggest surprise was that I was able to install it on my own (my first time using a soldering iron!) and didn’t even set off one explosion.