Installation pictures
Materials:
1. Lamp cord: I bought 18 gauge cord, but you could go thinner.
2. Add a fuse: you can use the Mini fuse taps -- the shop I went to said it won't work but trust me, they do. You do indeed still need to pick up another set of fuses (I picked up a set of ATM-10 amp fuses). In the pic below you can see the add a fuse plus an ATM-10 amp fuse in one of the slots plus another one (the empty slot is for the fuse that protects your DVD player). Pictured to the right is the existing Ford fuse (? I think they are called low profile/mini-ATM fuses?)
Install steps:
1. I took the lamp cord and split it down the middle, leaving one side longer to reach the fuse box, and the other side cut down about 12" lower to reach the ground point. That way, the rest of the electrical cord is held together for the run to the back of the seats. Make sure you know which you chose to be ground and which is 12V (personally, I used the ridged side of the cord to indicate 12V and the smooth to indicate ground). I missed taking a picture, but the lamp cord looks like this near the fuse box:
===============___________
with the longer part going to 12V and the shorter part going to ground. Excess slack can be tucked into the trim.
2. Pinch-crimp your lamp wire 12V side to the add a fuse and insert into slot #38 - an elusive ignition-switched circuit to avoid draining your battery (thanks Dino). As mentioned, the fuse box is on the driver side, up & to the left of the brake pedal.
3. Access the ground point by pulling up on the driver's side step plate then pulling the vertical panel outward. Dino's post outlines this well (
http://www.explorerforum.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2725796&postcount=14). Note this bolt is on REALLY tight -- I used a cheap socket screwdriver and actually cracked the plastic handle -- eventually I switched to a proper socket set and extension. To this ground screw, I attached the ground wire by crimping it to an O-ring and then screwed the existing screw back in.
4. Run the electrical cord to the back of the driver's seat, tucking it under the step plate as you go.
5. Unlatch the bottom of the seat covers to access the bottom of the seat. There are 3 hooks - you pull them away from you towards the front of the car and they eventually unlatch (they have a bit of a lip to them that holds them to the metal running along the bottom of the seat.
6. Remove the factory headrests. I then prepared the new DVD headrest -- I needed to slip the 12mm post adapters over the existing posts. A tip at this point: wrap a little bit of electrical tape to the existing DVD headrest posts before slipping the 12mm adapters over -- this helps avoid any rattling sound you might get due to the different diameters of the posts.
7. Once the factory headrests are off, use a straightened coat hanger wire to aim straight down the hole to the bottom of the seat. Be sure to put tape over both ends of the coat hanger wire to avoid poking through the seatback or snagging the fabric of your roof! Once you fish the wire through the bottom, tape the top of the wire to the matching DVD player's wires and feed this down. The hole diameter is small so you'll need to butt-end tape the connector to the coat hanger
Here's a picture of the seatcover bottom unlatched and the DVD headrest wires coming out:
As I mentioned, the right DVD headrest wire was just about 2" short of the bottom opening, so I had to scrunch my hand up the right bottom rectangle hole (stretching it a bit) then feed the video output cable connector up to my fingers inside the seat, then carefully connect them using just one hand (and avoid bending the pins). It might help to practice one-hand connecting the right sided wires before installing -- you can feel when the connectors properly mate before pushing them together.
Since the right cables were so hard to connect, I made sure I fed a ton of the AV out cable on the right side up into the seat so it isn't accidentally disconnected. There was no way for me to tape the right connectors together since they are connected inside the seat. There's still plenty of wire to reach the passenger side, and this makes it easier to manage the cabling anyway.
8. Tap into the power cable to connect the DVD headrest 12V power connector (red to 12V, black to ground). I used those crimp-on side taps but the gauge of the DVD player's power cables was way thinner than my lamp cable so I did some soldering to the connectors to ensure the skinny wires made a solid connection. You might find a better way to tap the power wires.
9. I then ran all of the driver's side wires over to the passenger side, and they all slip really easily under the center console. The existing slit in the carpet make the cable hide easy, and you can literally just push down on the carpet at the rear of the center console to pop the wires under.
10. Repeat the process for the passenger side. Once the wires are fished down, connect the video and audio output from the drivers side seat to the video and audio input on the passenger seat, and vice versa. That way each can act as a video source to the other.
11. I made sure I left enough slack for both seats to move forward and backward before taping and tying down all the wires nice and neat.
There is actually quite a bit of space to tuck in all of the AV connectors and the 12V fuse boxes all into the space where the backseat cover latches to the frame -- I managed to fit BOTH sets of AV connectors plus both 12V fuses and black boxes in that little space, then re-strapped the bottom seat cover onto the frame, not much of a visible bulge!
12. To maximize the FM transmission quality, I ran the green FM transmitter wires under the trim towards the third row since the FM antenna is at the top rear of the vehicle. Despite this, FM transmission audio quality is still pretty crappy.
13. The final result: nice and neat, fully functional and no wires seen anywhere!
14. My biggest gripe is these headrests don't support your head as well as the Ford factory rests, and you can see the difference in the front padding. When looking critically, the DVD headrests definitely lean quite a bit back vs. the Ford ones, but to all of my friends who looked, they couldn't believe these were not factory DVD players and were shocked by the price!
All in all, I'm really happy with the result. My kids tried them the first time this weekend and were ecstatic.
Good luck on your installs! Hope these images and tutorial help others.
