Michael Fang's Weblog Miko's Weblog

The CD Changer installed in the glove compartment of my car has ceased to function for several years already (it failed to recognize CDs in the 6 disc magazine). Today, after a few google searches, I found a discussion forum that has just the information I was looking for, a potential fix for the problem a lot of people have experienced in their Alpine CD changers. So, I decided to give it a try! For better or for worse.

First, I removed the changer from the glove compartment. That was a fairly easy task of unplugging 2 wiring connectors, since my changer wasn't properly secured to the glove compartment (missing mounting bracket/screws).

Now, with the changer sitting on my desk, remove the screws on the side of the changer as shown below.

Then, pop out the plastic clips to remove the front panel.

Then, remove the springs that suspends the internal casing for anti-vibration using a long nose plier.

Then, remove the 4 rubber bushings by hand, and open up the case as shown below.

Now, the actual repair/adjustment. On the lower left hand side of the picture below, you will see this worm/wheel drive gear. There was a small gap between them, causing the worm to not driving the gear, and therefore, failed to pick up the CD.

To adjust it, I first loosen the screw that's holding the gear in place, using one screw driver to push it closer to the worm gear, while using another screw driver to tighten the screw. I used my hand to rotate the worm a little bit to test out the operation.

Then, I reversed the steps and closed up the case and place the changer back into the car. It worked! Now, I can listen to CDs again :)  All-in-all, it took about one hour of work, and saved myself about $300 of repair bill.

Now, if I can find a way to repair the power antenna in the other car... part of the antenna was broken , so radio reception was extremely poor... I have found some exploded views of the parts, and hopefully I can take it apart and be able to order just the required parts, to save me another $350 (or save me $600 if I let my friendly dealer do the honor).

BMW Ultimate Drive is a fund raising event that donates $1 for every mile driven to Susan G. Komen for the Cure to help fight against breast cancer. The goal is to raise $12 million through the drive across the U.S.

On 6/8, the fleet of BMWs arrived at Concord BMW dealership.

Most of the model lineups were available for the drive: 1 series, 3 series, Z4, 5 series, 7 series, X3, X5, and the new X6.

There was a route map on the cabin of each car that took the participants through about 20 miles of combination city streets, highway, and scenic routes.

Since the X6 was a new model, I took one out for a spin.

That's me behind the wheel.

The X6 is a 4 passenger luxury sports activity coupe. It rides high like a SUV (BMW calls it SAV), yet, the interior gives an intimate feeling of a sports coupe.  The engine smothness and handling was first-rated. However, the rearward vision was almost none. The rear view mirror shows you a small strip of rear window, due to the highly sloped rear-end. Even when I turned my head left to watch out for the blind spot, the vision was also extremely limited. It does have a fancy backup camera and parking sensors to aid parking. Some kind of blind spot sensors or collision avoidance sensors would be useful on this car.

We also drove the X5.

It has more interior space, and the outward vision is much better than the X6. We missed a highway exit and had to drive about 10 extra miles to get back to the dealership with the help of the GPS. The iDrive joystick (or what Motor Trend called "Tumor") took some experiment to program the GPS to take us back to the dealership.

Due to the waiting line and the hot weather, we only drove the X5 and X6 and contributed about $50 of fund rasing to support The Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The event will be happening at Washington state during the weekend of 6/20-6/23. Then continue to Minnesota (6/26-6/28), South Dakota (6/30), Iowa (7/2, 7/16), Nebraska, and other midwest states and the rest of the country.