Monday, November 9, 2009

Bell 3-way car power adapter

Update- Blog moved to: http://saleemabdulhamid.com/blog/2009/11/bell-3-way-car-power-adapter

I went through two of these Bell 3-way car power adapters last week:

It was $12.99 at Pepboys, part no. 39023-4. I haven't been able to find this exact one online, although I haven't looked very much and there are admittedly thousands of variations on it so finding it may be a bit difficult. Anyone who comes across it on a site that has reviews should send me a link so I can leave a review for it.

So the first one lasted about 30 mins on the highway I think, but I didn't even notice it was not working. What happened was, two of the ports died while the third, the one farthest from the switch was still fine (you'll see why this happened in a minute). So the one my iPod Dock was plugged into was working, while the GPS had switched to battery without me even noticing, until about an hour and a half later when it started telling me the battery was low.

Now, for some reason, I decided to return it without opening it up to see what was wrong. Crazy, right? In my defense, it was only one day old, and I was going to Pepboys that day again anyway, and I was worried if I broke something visible they might not take it back.

Anyway, I got a second one, and it lasted a bit longer than the first. This one I mounted properly in the car, rather than letting it kick around on the floor, and it lasted about a week before one of the ports died on me. A day or two later the second one also died and I was back where I started with the first one.

This time, I was smart enough to open it up. I mean it's not like there could be anything that complicated in there, right? It's just a three way power split. So maybe there's some flaw in the design that I can fix instead of exchanging it again.

Sure enough, the problem was just poor manufacturing and took a screwdriver, soldering iron, and all of five minutes to fix. Four screws on the back of the unit have to be removed for it to split into two halves (ignore the screws in the mounting brackets):

As soon as I opened it, I saw the problem. This is the fixed one, but before I resoldered it, the solder points of the first two ports had been just touched with solder and so very easily, with a little wiggling, they had come undone:

I resoldered those points, touched up all the other solder joints for good measure and reassembled and now it's working as good as (better than?) new.

99 Saab 9-3 Heated Seats

Update- Blog moved to: http://saleemabdulhamid.com/blog/2009/11/99-saab-9-3-heated-seats


So, I bought a 1999 Saab 9-3 recently. Here she is:

The heated seats were not working (I know, big deal right? But hey I bought this car for the small luxuries :)) on the driver's side. At first, I thought maybe I was just not sensitive enough to be able to feel the heat, since the passengers kept commenting about how nice the heated seats were, and I couldn't feel anything. But then I spent a bit of time sitting on the passenger's side in my driveway with the car running and realized that it wasn't anything wrong with me, it was actually the seats that were not working. So I decided to figure out what was wrong and fix it.

Okay, so for some reason, the Haynes manual for this car does not exist in the U.S., it's not even on their website. Fortunately, I managed to find one via google from state of nine.com:

Unfortunately, it's a bit of a pain to try and find anything in it since it's full of British terms for stuff- I knew about the boot and bonnet, but did you know they call the muffler a "silencer" and the antenna the "aerial"? Jeeeez, speak English, people! ;)

Anyway, it turns out the Haynes manual is not much use for this task anyway. Here's what it has to say about the heated seats:
Access to the heating elements can only be gained by removing the upholstery from the seat- this is an operation which should be entrusted to a Saab dealer.
Gee, thanks a lot, Mr. Haynes. And the instructions on removing the seats are there but not really needed since Saab designed this car with very easily removable front seats. It's just four socket head screws (really, what is the deal with socket head screws, Saab? They're literally everywhere on this car!) and you're done. But before I figured out how easy that was, I tried removing the upholstery while the seats were still in the car. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to remove the upholstery, but the heating elements are sewn into the cushion in these early models, so full replacement might be difficult. In most cases though, it is probably not necessary, as I found out.

REMEMBER TO DISCONNECT THE BATTERY BEFORE WORKING ON THE SEATS! The side airbag is mounted in the seat and the wiring is side by side with the heater wires so you don't want to by fooling around in their with the airbag live.
The upholstery is held on by these clip-type thingies that fold around each other and run the length of the cloth. On the rear of the seat, start with the left side:

I found that if you start from the bottom and just pull to the left, it will pop out and you can easily remove the whole thing. Reattaching it is very easy, just fold it over and push it back in, it clicks right into place.
Then the right side:
On the bottom there are two flaps- the outer one is just attached with an elastic cord to a clip on the bottom of the seat:

The inner one is clipped just like the sides were, as you can see in the picture. Once all three sides are unclipped, you can pull out the cardboard backing of the seat and see where the wires are for the heater:
Okay, so at this point I couldn't see anything wrong from the back of the seat, so I decided to pull the whole seat out so I could more easily remove the front upholstery. (It turns out this was actually unnecessary, as you'll see in a minute the "broken" part was actually very easy to get to.) As I mentioned before, this is relatively simple, and just involves removing 4 screws basically, and then lifting the seat out of the car door (you also have to disconnect the seat belt, which requires removing the seat belt and thus the cover on the side, but you can figure out how to do this, if you have to).

If you're doing this, before removing the seat, you should check the connector under the seat to make sure the seat heater is actually getting power. You'll have to figure out which of the wires is the heater connection since the same connector has the air bag connection, seatbelt sensor, and maybe other stuff depending on your options. I think the two large connectors (not the wrapped in yellow wires in the next picture up) are the ones you want to check. Make sure you have 12V there. If not something is wrong with either the switch, fuses, or wiring, so there is no point in taking the seat apart.



Once you checked that, you can choose whether to pull the seat out or not to remove the front upholstery. I don't think it would be that difficult to remove without pulling the seat, but since the seat is so easy to remove, it might just be more convenient to do it anyway.

The front seat upholstery is attached in the same way the rear is, the clips in this case are on the bottom of the seat, where the cloth folds over and clips in. Pull the seat cloth off of the cushioning, and you might just come upon the obviously broken part of your seat. I did:



Apparently, something damaged the heater wire in this area resulting in higher resistance and therefore greater heat in the wire at this spot. This lead to the burning hot temperatures that were high enough to burn the wire itself and melt a sizable hole in the upholstery (it just barely stopped before making a visible hole in the outside of the cloth). I'm not sure how it managed to burn this much without the previous owner smelling something burning and shutting it off, but maybe it happened several times rather than all at once. If something similar to this is your problem, all you need to do is twist the wires back together, solder them, and close the seat back up. The solder may not even be necessary, but you may want to tie them with something metallic. I didn't think electrical tape was a good idea, given that the wires are made to get hot....

If you need to remove more of the seat cover to get to your problem, be aware that there are some clips inside the grooves in the seat that have to be unfastened (four of them):
In the back of the seat, where it meets the back rest, there is what I think is a heat sensor (I googled the numbers on it but came up empty):


It's been a week now and the seats are working beautifully so far. I've driven for more than two hours without any holes being burned through my body, so I think it's safe, and it definitely feels great on my long drives.

One thing that puzzled me is that I couldn't find where the heater wires connect from the backrest cushion to the seat cushion. The heater wire from the connector goes directly to the backrest without splitting of anywhere and I couldn't see any wires from the backrest to the seat cushion anywhere. The only thing I can guess is that maybe it passes through the inside of the hinges where it would have less flexing.

I've read somewhere online that newer models of this car had the heaters as a separate part rather than sewn into the cushion itself. If that is possible, it may be possible to purchase those seat heaters and insert them into the seat and just leave the existing ones unplugged, assuming they are interchangeable. This may be a better option if it is not just a simple break like mine was, or you're worried that it may burn up in a different spot later on.

One last thing- apparently, if you disconnect the airbag power before disconnecting the battery or reconnect the battery before plugging the seat in, the airbag system will go into warning mode. I've seen a few places online say it just needs to be reset with an ODB II tools, so I have to go and get this done now and I'll post again with the results.

Is this fix dangerous? I don't think so. The way I see it, the part of the wire you are reattaching, by twisting together, will have much less resistance than the rest of the wire, therefore it will heat up less and it is not likely that part will burn out again. Is it possible that some other part of the seat will burn out, since it did it once? Yes, but that is a flaw in the design/ old age/ misuse of the seats and has nothing to do with whether you do this fix or not. The heat wire is sewn into the entire surface of the seat and backrest, so I guess as the wire gets old and maybe by poking it with something sharp like a knee or something it might be weakened and that's what causes the failure you see above.
If anything bad happens or the seat fails again, I'll definitely post about it here.