Stock Silver

Hi there - I'm a new guy in these parts and have been blown away by the collective wisdom available here. I've recently picked up a silver P5 and have been loving the car. It has less than 500 miles on the odo and, if your sniffer is working well, you can still pick-up a hint of new car smell.

OK - Love the car. Now I want to change it.

Has anyone put a 12v power outlet in the compartment under the armrest? I don' like losing a cup holder to the cell phone charger and I would prefer to have an unswitched outlet (or at least independent of the ignition) so that the phone could charge without the key in the ignition.

I did do a search and did not find much. Maybe I searched for the wrong things. I would appreciate any help/pointers you could give.

Thanks.

mazdaspeedwest

i hope thos wires aren't the kind i think they are....

hihoslva

But - why did you need to hook the horns up to the battery?

My compressor is simply hooked to the existing horn wire, and grounded to the compressor bracket, and that's it - no mods necessary.

And - all horns work with the car off .

~HH

igator210

I don't have a picture, but I added a three way outlet into my glove compartment. Due to safety reason, it is switch (it does suck for charging stuff.) But I now have my radar detector wiring hidden and when I charge the cell phone, it's out of the way. This also leaves one other slot for something else.

To wire it up, all I had to do was tap some safe lines. I hate doing electrical work myself, so I had a buddy help.

The last car I had, I did the same thing, except I ran wires directly to the battery. The only thing I hated about that was running the wires through the firewall was a bitch.

mazdaspeedwest

not all, check out some older VWs....

demoninvictus

i love the idea of this mazdaspeedwest, you can just pick one of these pieces off of preppy-boys, right? just curious.. and by the way, my APC (american pieces of crap) fogs run on 14 awg wire... no problems as of yet! does that air horn set-up (i've seen plenty of pics on your website on that) is that loud at all?
thanks,
kevin

hihoslva

Air horn = probably the best "mod" I've done to my car.

Definitely one of the most useful upgrades you can make.

~HH

THEGOLDPRO

wow protege menace, that is one ugly wiring job you did, just a suggestion, so dont get all pissy at me, im, just trying to help. shorten the wire that is all bunched up on your battery, i couldent tell if you had some actual electrical connecter, to hook it all to your battery if not i would buy some, so your not just tightening your wire to it. also get some black wire loom, and cover all the wire, so it looks cleaner. just a suggestion. it makes it look less of a hack job.

mazdaspeedwest

yup, most auto parts places will have them. The air horm compressor wires should be as thick as possible and as short as possible, i suggest 12awg for the wires or even 10awg.

The fogs should be ok on 14awg.

yes, they are loud.

demoninvictus

thats sickening fellas.. that you'd take a horn kit meant for rv's, trucks or maybe even a boat, and put it on a protege. what posessed you to do that? oh, and by the way, where is this wire to the existing horn you guys are talking about? heh, *quivers in anticipation* oh, and exactly, how legal is this?

UCSBgeek

& Volvos



Yeah I think it's better to keep the air horns seperate as to only use them when you really "need" them

demoninvictus

ok, did some research at the local library and found some old manuals on the first gen protege... plus i did some visual searching in the car itself... and after looking real hard, i found the disk mechanism that emmits your horn sound. and i'm sure a few of you actually know, but if you look under your passenger side fender, tucked in real deep under the headlight, you should see a disk mechanism with a shielded wire going to it. this wire is the positive to your horn (the ground wire to the horn is mounted to the chasis i'm guessing). i went to pepboys and bought a pair of electric horns that run positive and negative wires, and since they are electric, no compressor or hoses is needed. i cut the wire shielding away from the wire, placed a quick-splice into the positive wire of the stock horn, and grounded the horn to a bolt on my fender chasis. i just laid the damn things in there for the time being, cause actually finding a place to mount these damn things is going to be a task of getting under the car and doing some drilling to get these freakin things mounted properly, but let me freakin tell you, these things tear you a new *** if you're in front of me. i would have loved actually having ones with a compressor, but i'm just afraid of all the effort i'd actually have to put in to do a quality job . unfortunately, because i am lazy, the horns aren't grounded properly, the horns aren't mounted at all, and my air horns work with the stock horn (3 horns, heh). and to top it off, it's f*cking obnoxious having all that racket under my hood, HAHA!!

thanks guys, i'll post pics some day when they're actually mounted right