heinzboehmer's 2002 Topaz 6MT Coupe

[Bry5on]

Very curious to learn if your car shocks you every time you get out and close the door with the dinamica inserts. Mine does..

Did you try the recaros back to back with the nogaros? It must be just my body but I find the speedsters to be much more supportive than the nogaros.

[heinzboehmer]

LMFAO!!!! That is awesome!!!

Which variant did you end up going with?

Got the GRP with vinyl/dinamica. Considered the CF ones for a sec, but I just couldn't stomach the price increase. Excited about them!

Very curious to learn if your car shocks you every time you get out and close the door with the dinamica inserts. Mine does..

Did you try the recaros back to back with the nogaros? It must be just my body but I find the speedsters to be much more supportive than the nogaros.

I didn't try them back to back, but I did try them close enough together in time to compare them in my mind. I also think the sporsters feel a bit more snug, but I'm not a huge fan of the weight and the harness holes do not fit me at all, so went with the nogaros.

I honestly didn't even consider the getting shocked thing as a possibility lol. I'll let you know once I get them.

[Bry5on]

I forgot that you use harnesses, yeah that’s a deal breaker.

since I’ve got window frames on my door, I always close the door from the edge of the window frame and most of the time I get a nice little shock, even when I try using my elbow through a jacket It’s a bit weather dependent (warm and dry) as you might expect. Maybe if you close the door from the edge of the glass just above the door you’ll be in the clear. Normally I wouldn’t recommend closing the door via the glass but that might help if you see the same issue!

[heinzboehmer]

Another picture heavy post coming up!

When I was running my MK60 harness through my interior, I accidentally broke the wireless charger I had previously installed. It had always been quite a bit slow to charge my phone (measured it at about 1W), so I decided to take the opportunity and upgrade it. And since I was already doing that, I decided to redo the install as well.

Previously, I had used some piggyback spade terminals to grab 12V from the cigarette lighter. This then ran to a 12V socket, to a 5V USB charger and out to the wireless charging board. Since this was wired to the cigarette lighter, the thing would get power all the time, so I also wired a switch in to turn it off when I would be parking the car for longer periods of time. Not very elegant, but it did work. Here's a pic of the previous setup:



In that pic you can also see a cut wire spliced into the red one. This is for the constant power required by my dashcam for parked recording. Since this was all going away, I decided to redo the dashcam install as well.

The dashcam also requires switched 12V and GND to run, but I had grabbed those from the homelink up in the headliner. Instead of tapping or cutting into the wires, I had opened up the unit and soldered two wires to the power inputs:




I was still going to be running a wire up from the center console area, so I went ahead and desoldered those.

With all this removed, I had to find a new source of power. The eject box wiring is present on my car (I think all US cars got this?), so I decided to tap into that. TIS told me there were multiple sources of 12V in the connector, but wasn't super helpful at helping me identify which were constant and which were switched. I poked around with a multimeter and found the following:

Pin	Description	Wire Color	Note
2	GND	Brown	N/A
3	12V Switched by Interior Lights	Red/Grey	No fuse, direct from LSZ
5	12V Constant	Red/Yellow	10A Fuse
6	12V Switched by Key	Violet/White	5A Fuse

It has everything I need, so I ordered some TE connectors (1-962692-2 for the eject box and some other two and three pin connectors for the rest) and a MOSFET switch solid state relay board thing (didn't want a relay clicking under the dash). I added this last component because I didn't want to run the wireless charger off of the 5A fuse. Instead, I'm using the switched 12V to send power from the 10A fused wire to the wireless charger.

I searched around for a bit and ended up buying a wireless charging board that can supposedly do 15W fast charging:



I tested it out on the bench and was only able to get 5W charging on my phone by supplying the board with 12V, so the listing was either a bit optimistic or failed to mention that you need 24V to get 15W charging. Either way, I'm happy enough with 5W, so it's fine. I also measured the current draw and it peaked close to 900mA. I think not running the board off of the switched 12V was a good call, as I would have been using close to 20% of the fuse rating just for this thing.

I then had to figure out how to mount this thing to the center console cubby where I put my phone while driving. It's significantly bigger than the previous one, so I had to get creative:



Unfortunately the coil wires were not long enough for it to work in this configuration, but the clearance was great. There's a ton of space behind this cubby thing:



I decided to try extending the wires just to see what would happen:



To my surprise, it worked just fine! Guess the change in wire length didn't mess with the resonance tuning enough to make a difference. Or maybe they still fall within what the board can adjust to. Either way, still seeing 5W charging with it like this.

Not onto the more boring task of building and running the harness.

I decided to split this up into three parts for easier disassembly. First came the part of harness that goes to the eject box connector. Here is the MOSFET board I bought:



Removed the screw terminals and LED:




Then measured wire lengths and wired everything up. Made it so the charger and dashcam connectors would come out right under the shift boot, for easier disconnecting. The two wire connector is for the charger and the three wire one is for the dashcam (more on that in a bit):



Next, I measured and wired up the charger:




Ran down to the car for a quick test:



Charger only came on with the key in position 2 and was still charging at 5W. Nice.

I added some heat shrink to the board and wrapped the wires in Tesa tape to prevent rattles. Then stuck it to the cubby with some double sided mounting tape:




Next up was the dashcam harness.

I could have just ran the constant 12V wire up and kept the switched 12V and GND from the homelink connector, but decided to run all three up instead. Wires are thin enough that it doesn't make a huge difference and doing it this way means I have one harness running to the camera instead of two. I did have to run the switched 12V directly from the 5A pin (instead of switched through the MOSFET like with the charger) because the board I bought switches the GND wire, not the positive one. No big deal since the camera should basically not draw any current from that.

Note to future self: do not run any higher current loads off of this switched 12V.

Here's the dashcam harness complete and the stock dashcam power stuff terminated with the corresponding connector:




Tested that and then moved on to making everything short and rattle proof. Unfortunately didn't have heat shrink that was the correct diameter for the switch board. I was going to wrap the whole thing anyway, so I cut a piece off of a larger diameter roll and then taped over it. I just wanted the heat shrink there for electrical isolation, so all good.



Since I was already doing it, I wrapped everything in Tesa tape. Such a tedious thing to do, but at least it looks nice:

[heinzboehmer]

Then proceeded to run everything through the interior nicely.

First up was reinstalling all the dashcam electronics. You can just barely see them tucked away inside the headliner on the upper left of this picture. The micro USB plug comes out the front of the headliner and goes to the camera:



Then came the three wire harness that goes down to the center console. Started up at the headliner and tucked it in along the leading edge:



It's currently just hanging out in the headliner as I wasn't able to reach far enough to clip it into the harness clips that are present. I guess I'll have to do that whenever I have the headliner off (CF roof install maybe?).

I continued by running the harness along the A pillar and down towards the dash. I really didn't want it to interfere with the airbags, so I took the A pillar covers off and tucked it away nicely next to the existing harness:




Ran it through the dash and into the glovebox area:




Zip tied it out of the way behind the glove box:




And finally ran it into the dash and to the center console:



Put the eject box part of the harness in place and connected it to the dashcam bit:



Here's how the eject box section is ran:



Then came the charger. Reassembled the top portion of the center console and fished the charger power wire out into the shifter area:




One thing I'm not super happy about is how the charger coils sit against the underside of the cubby. Installing is not an issue at all, but they catch against the trim right above the switch panel on removal. Have to get my fingernail under the lower section of the cubby and pull up slightly to be able to remove it. Oh well, there always has to be one thing that doesn't go super smoothly.

Note to future self: do the lifting up thing and don't rip out the coils when trying to remove the cubby.

Last step was to connect to the eject box connector.



Kept that foam condom thing around the connector to try and avoid rattles.

Tested and still good! No final pics because the interior looks the same as always.

All in all pretty happy with this little project. As per usual, it went from a simple fix to a complete redesign, but I'm glad I did it. The previous implementation was sorta half assed and was annoying to work around. This new one splits up into sections super easily and is much cleaner.

[nuc1]

All in all pretty happy with this little project. As per usual, it went from a simple fix to a complete redesign, but I'm glad I did it. The previous implementation was sorta half assed and was annoying to work around. This new one splits up into sections super easily and is much cleaner.

You have yet again described every car project I've ever done. Fun to read your journal and the car looks great.

Mike

[bigjae46]

I thought you were making a bomb...then I realized it was a contact charger! lol

Nice work!

[Slideways]

I thought you were making a bomb...then I realized it was a contact charger! lol

Nice work!

LOL, the heinzboebeemer is a wiring guru.

[heinzboehmer]

You have yet again described every car project I've ever done. Fun to read your journal and the car looks great.

Mike

Thank you! Funny how the snowballing always seems to happen, no? Feels great when you're done though.

I thought you were making a bomb...then I realized it was a contact charger! lol

Nice work!

LOL, the heinzboebeemer is a wiring guru.

Lol, thanks. Goes to show just how much I ended overcomplicating the simple replacement of the charger.

[heinzboehmer]

Also, posting the charger update made me realize that I ran the harness in a spot that would potentially interfere with the glovebox. Thought it felt a little weird when putting it on, but I guess it didn't feel weird enough to make me question it.

Anyway the potential issue was here:



I couldn't find a good way to poke my hand in there to check, but I think the side of the glovebox rests against that metal bracket. The harness was easy enough to rerun, so I just did that:



Now won't have to worry about potentially rubbing through the harness and causing a short.

[heinzboehmer]

Looks like the M3 made it onto the latest M539 Restorations video (on the right):



Was fun meeting and hanging out with everyone there. Sreten is a pretty cool dude. He seemed jealous of the cars with carbon airboxes and kept saying how the M3 he bought sounded like shit lol

[Casa de Mesa]

That's pretty awesome. I will go check out that video now!

[D-O]

The wireless charger is nicely done. Was it some sort of kit, or roll your own?

Thanks.

D-O

[heinzboehmer]

The wireless charger is nicely done. Was it some sort of kit, or roll your own?

Thanks.

D-O

Thanks! Not a kit, I bought the parts (charging board, MOSFET board, connectors, etc.) and made/assembled everything myself.

[D-O]

Very well done, sir.

D-O