Twistedsymphony's Projects
After getting harassed by a co-worker for having ugly faded plastic cladding on my Vehicross, I finally got around to trying out the Refinish Restorer product I imported from Germany. I am so incredibly happy with the results, you have no idea.
BEFORE – AFTER
I recently added some clear turn signal covers to the Vehicross (along with orange bulbs so they light up the proper color) .
I also picked up a Silvia Grill for the 240sx. I had looked at these when I first got the car and could only find them beat up and in really odd colors for $200 ish prices after shipping… I saw this one, in great shape and with original paint in my color for about 1/4th that so I snatched it up.
I think both of these do quite a bit to clean up the looks of the cars a bit… and wow, both of my cars need a bath.
One of the members on Vehicross.info wanted a circuit that would light up the interior door handles of his car for a few seconds after he turned the key off to allow passengers to more easily find the door handles in the dark (they are actually difficult to find in the VX since they’re mounted quite low).
I came up with a circuit using a 555 timer in Monostable mode that looks for the ACC signal to dissappear, since it goes from 12V to float and since the 555 needs a pulse I used both a pull down resistor to ground as well as an RC circuit to pull the 555 trigger back up.
I have a set of power folding mirrors for the 240, I’m thinking about customizing them so that they auto fold in and out with the ignition.
Here’s a circuit I drew up.
So yesterday I registered, the Vehicross, after which I had the oil changed with a full synthetic and had the coolant flushed and replaced, and changed the air filter.
Today I spent some time cleaning up the cloudy headlights…
YUCK!
Half Done!
All Done… it looks like new
I spent a few hours yesterday installing an setting up my new system. I love doing harness work, all connections are soldered with Silver and then sealed with shrink tubes.
This unit is AWESOME and everything I wanted it to be. The navigation works fantastic, the picture quality is great and it sounds fantastic. All of the touch screen controls are easy to see and understand too.
I still have some stuff to finish up though, I need to find a more pertinent route for the GPS receiver module as right now it’s just running along the floor under the passenger’s floor mat. I need to get an antenna adapter so I use the regular radio, and I’ll probably want to bypass the factory amp in the trunk as right now it’s way too loud, and the sound quality will probably be better coming directly from this unit.
During my Senior year at Rensselaer I worked on special team of students in conjunction with General Motors tasked with developing an options package for the Saturn Ion that would appeal to buyers in the “Generation Y” demographic.
We spend a good several months doing nothing but market research, then sketched and brainstormed based on then, then made photoshop and CAD concepts, then more market research to validate our ideas.
Once all that was done we made some prototypes. Most of the prototypes were pretty lame and really poor attempts at recreating what was in the sketches. While not the prettiest thing in the world my good friend Brandon and I spent nearly 72 hours straight recreating, in the flesh, the most popular front facia concept. I had created numerous concept facias using photoshop and the marketing guys determined that the “J1” concept was the clear winner. The “J’ stood for Japanese as the design used queues from Honda and Nissan sports models. I was pretty pleased with the outcome.
