This cool idea is courtesy of bimmerforums member “So Live”:

Well, I love my ipod and always will. Im sure many of you are the same way. I have no real reason to buy a whole new head unit other than for my ipod. Ive done some research and found that some people with other cars have hard wired in a head phone cable or what ever. I decided to do the same.

Heres what i did:
-Trip to walmart to get a tape adapter. The one with a 1/8″ sterio plug on one end and a tape on the other.

-Cut the wire as close to the tape as possible.

-Strip the three wires inside (red white black).

-Pull the radio

-Then i proceded to open up my stock radio by removing the three screws for the top most cover. I looked around, nothing too promising. Theres this paper stuff taped to the internals just to the right of the tape deck. i moved the paper and what do i find? a plug with three wires in it. Red white and black.

-Take your tapeless tape adapter and solder the wires to where the plug is soldered to the board. The little posts line up the the wires coming out of the plug underneath.

-Tack them on and there you have it, a hard wired sterio input. then i took the adapter wire and had it exit the right rear corner of the radio for clearance.

-Screw the top back on and you can put the 1/8 sterio plug where ever you want it. Through the glove box or out under the hvac panel.

I almost forgot to mention you have to have a tape in the deck to get audio from the ipod. It dosnt seem to matter if the tape has audio or not on it. Only down fall with having a real tape in there is when the tape reaches its end it has to switch sides. Just use the faux tape you cut off the adapter. Normal tapes will play if you don’t have the ipod plugged in.

This entry was posted on November 29, 2012 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Do it Yourself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.