Even at my age I still love cranking the music while I’m driving. When you have a long commute, you don’t mind it as much when your tunes are on. A couple of months ago my CD player in my 2007 C6 Vette decided to toss error message rather than belting out music. I thought perhaps the CD was bad and changed it out. Nope…still only read errors. Ejected that one and tried a third and got the same result.
Ya know, radio ain’t what it use to be, it’s sad when you can go nearly half your drive hearing only one track and the rest of the trip is listen to a couple of voices attempt to entertain you and fill the ‘dead air” with totally horrible local commercials. After programming the buttons on the receiver and about a month of actually mashing the buttons on the radio, 40 times a each way, I decided to pick up a used stereo online and swap them out. It only took a few minutes to find a used stereo (receiver and CD player) that coincidentally came from a 2007 Corvette and of course you trust that it works and this one did.
I hadn’t up to this date spend any time taking the dash apart on the C6 -unlike my 1970 Mustang and 1984 Corvette where I visited behind their dashboards a lot. So I reached out across the nation, via Google to find instructions. Needless to say there are a lot of videos out there and after the first time pulling the center dash off it’s pretty easy (yeah…I had to do that more than once).
Caution: As with most tech laden cars, be careful of all wire connections. Highly unusual for me, I avoided all those fit falls.
This is the lower part of the dash (ashtray cig lighter areas) opened up. You can clearly see the back side of the cigarette lighter (maybe we should call them – power port – whole generation out there that don’t know that this luxury item is). Additionally, there is the connection to the to a second power port and at least in most models the traction control. Just highlighting the necessity to be careful.
In short you have to remove the consul storage lid (a few hex drivers are required for that) and the unsnap the cover for the emergency brake as well as remove the shift knob. The rest pulls off easily…BUT…first disconnect the power ports.
There are a few screws for pulling out the cd player and receiver and you’ll need to disconnect the power and antenna.
You can find that all out on one of the online video or you tube and since this isn’t the subject matter of the post I’ll let you find the one you like.
Dropping in the replace stereo is just as easy….piece of cake! Just before putting all the trim pieces back in I rested the CD/Receiver units and tested it. It played for a few seconds and then “LOCKED”. Clearly a bad sign.
Stay tuned for how the options and how I handled it.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
