Pulled the stereo to try and figure out why it won't turn on. Dashboard radio fuse was fine, so was the underhood "back-up power" fuse which is commonly missed. Must be the 7.5A fuse inside the radio, I figured.
Others I talked to before taking the itchbay apart could not believe a stock Civic stereo still existed, and that surely it was a hacked up wiring harness inside the dashboard. But the illumination wire was apparently working - turning the headlights on made half of the radio glow (more on this later).
Strangely, nobody in the Honda community has ever posted about replacing this fuse.
Pull the radio, take it partially apart, can't yank the fuse. Won't come out. WTF. Can't get a good sight on the fuse, so I continuity-test it, which it fails.
Bring the radio inside, put the thing on the bench, take it all the way apart. Sure enough, fuse is visibly blown. can't yank the fuse. Won't come out. WTF. Multiple passes with upside down computer duster and a procession of increasingly violent prying tools aren't doing itshay other than cracking the exterior plastic.
Finally hold a replacement 7.5A fuse up to the board... pretty sure those uckfayers
soldered the fuse in.
There's no way it can fit! The fuse "holder" was just there to ease assembly, and then they globbed solder onto the fuse's legs.
I'm debating desoldering the existing fuse holder and then putting in one on a nice long wire so I can mount the fuse externally.
Seems like a lot of work to go to when I could just replace the head unit with one made in the last decade, but I really like the 90s-ness of it. I'm torn. Nobody makes a sufficiently 90s stereo
Interesting FactsInteresting if you're me, and uckfay you if you're not.
- Honda puts a little rubber trim tape piece around the face of the head unit to keep it from rattling against the dash. I'm pretty impressed at the attention to detail on this car; they made things nice without making them expensive. No doubt the low Yen at the time helped.
- The head unit is probably outsourced, but I have no idea who did it. They almost certainly aren't very proud of this. It was, however, "Made in Japan," which is cool since the car itself was made in Canada.
- They still used through-hole assembly of discrete off-the-shelf components in the early 90s; I figured all this itshay would have been SMD with a bunch of custom chips. I guess "The Japanese," huh? I would love to hear from one of the actual electrical engineers slash supply chain engineers on the board because I have questions.
- The case is almost entirely held together with weird bent-metal prongs, like 80s stereos I've seen. Not a lot of screws going on here, but the screws that are here are high-quality cad-plated JIS panhead screws similar to the ones the Subaru OEM "Alpines" use. Watch out for the "hidden" bent metal prong directly underneath the tape slot; it will uckfay up your board if you just tug with it still in place.
- There's a little transparent plastic bootie that slips over the radio connector. That's a nice idea! Considering that the inside of a dashboard is a high-moisture environment the connector came right apart first time.
- All of the lighting on the radio is only done with two LEDs; they have an elaborate acrylic 'light pipe' behind the fascia that take care of routing the glow to each individual button. I think the passenger-side LED is blown out but I won't bother fixing it. I'm not mentally ill.
- NEC made the tuner chip. Seeing NEC stuff in Bubble Era products always makes me smile.