ICE, ICE Baby
One of the minor upgrades was sorting out the standard Ford head unit to something a little more modern.
The standard head unit that came with the car was actually pretty good for the time. Feeding four speakers, again not bad for OEM units, the RDS 5000 as seen in the passenger foot well, has such wonderful features as a removable security panel, RDS tuner, cassette player (for the youths amongst us, this is a ‘cassette’) and this one was even hooked up to an optional CD multi-changer in the boot. Cutting edge stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.
However the modern way of listening to music means that a bit of change was due. I mean, with all of our music ripped to FLAC who wants to start burning CDs and changing them over? Thankfully we’d be gifted a few head units that would aid us by adding a line input or even USB playback. Ideally we would’ve liked Bluetooth but beggars can’t be choosers.
There’s only one slight problem and yet again it’s a bloody Ford-ism. You see back then Ford used to supply head units in non-standard ‘1.5′ DIN size, as opposed to the industry standard single or double DIN (supposedly as an additional security feature as nicked stereos wouldn’t work in anything other than another Ford. Genius…..). Converting to a double DIN unit would mean hacking out bits of the dash, but thankfully a single DIN adaptor kits are available for a few quid and include the ISO cabling adaptor. Fitting it was a bit of a pain in the arse as the mounting kit doesn’t quite lift the back of the stereo high enough, so it’s parked at a bit of an angle. However, it’s in and it works. The gifted stereo we used actually lacks a piece of trim to hide the edges which we didn’t realise at the time, so it’ll probably get swapped again soon for one of the others we have.
I actually intend to take the original RDS 5000 apart and attach a Bluetooth module. I doubt that’ll be done in time for the trip, but it would keep the OEM look myself and Jacknife prefer. I found the module I’ll use, which would also give a Aux in and possibly a hands free option, whilst maintaining the multi-changer in the boot. You know, for those CDs I said I didn’t want to use earlier...