New heater control knobs and other cheap upgrades for the car

It's an old Mk2 Ford Focus, and because life is so boring at the moment, I thought I would replace the heater knobs in my car with the knobs from the Mk3 I bought from Ebay. Also this gives me the opportunity to write the word "knob" several times on this page

There are some other upgrades I did some time ago, which are further down the page


Heater controls

We'll start with the old boring knobs, I haven't liked them since I got the car, so they have to go



This is how you remove them, they're held on pretty tight, so pull hard. I tried pulling them with just my fingers, nothing happened



Then just push the new ones on, you need to push them on hard as you there's a clip that fights you. They will only go on one way, so the indicator on the knob lines up with the correct indication on the panel, they are all the same, so any one will fit



They do look and feel a lot better to my fingers



Here you can see how they look when fitted correctly, the plastic tube on the back of the knob needs to ride over a raised bit of plastic on the shaft, which then locates in a hole on the tube, it will take some force to push them fully home, but they will suddenly just give and slide fully home




USB, AUX, and DAB

The more observant of you will notice the twin USB, aux in, and DAB adaptor just below the heater controls. Each USB socket can supply 2 amps of power, and they are powered by a 5 amp three port USB car power adaptor



By sheer coincidence, two USB extension leads fit perfectly in the clip on the back of the blanking panel, so all you need to do is use a Dremel type drill and remove the plastic guides from inside the clip, then cut a hole in the blanking plate, finally hot glue the sockets in place. I ran the leads to a three port 12v USB power adaptor hidden behind the radio, which is hard wired into the fuse box via a piggy back fuse connected to an ignition live, the third port on the USB power adaptor goes to the dash cam which uses less than 1 amp

The aux in is just a 3.5mm female to female barrel adaptor hot glued into the other blanking panel, then a standard aux lead runs down to the aux in on the DAB adaptor, and the line out runs via another aux lead to the aux in socket inside the glove box. I know I didn't cut a very good hole, I don't need it pointed out!

By the way, stick-on windscreen aerials and cheap signal splitters are completely rubbish, get yourself a proper DAB aerial and be amazed how much more signal they pull in, I can even pick up DAB radio in multi-storey car parks with mine, it very rarely runs out of signal now

I am waiting for some more ebay purchases to arrive...

For the radio upgrade story, click here