Sebastian Woodhouse

Puddle lights are ace 🙂 Could do my toenails in that light.

The last of my adventures today involves stabbing the car with these: I am a little surprised at just how easy the trims around the window switches comes off. Original and my aftermarket switches viewed from the bottom. They look pretty well identical which is a good sign. The switches also clip into place making the majority of the job sensationally easy. While the drivers door pops apart the same way the switch unit is mounted with 3 screws. It’s a zero effort swap still, and nice to have switches without wear on the symbols. A crappy night photo. The light is far more blue (although still technically ice-blue) and the Lock Button lights up Red on the lock side one. Overall for the $100 spent I’m happy. Probably would get the white version if I was doing this again, but equally I can just swap the LEDs in these to match the rest of the LEDs at some point.

If you think puddle lights trigger me, then those dirty dim number plate lamps… Camera detection of number plates doesn’t rely on working number plate lamps, so there’s no reason to not resolve this. Half done. Like the puddle lamps I’ve skipped the wrestle of getting T10 LEDs into dirty housings and gone straight for LED replacement units. way whiter, way brighter. Install is a game, unclipped a lot of the bootlid liner. Back off the nuts retaining the garnish to give some wiggle room of the garnish. Clip the light assembly, then wiggle all items to rotate it out of the garnish. But still only a trim clip tool and a 10mm deep socket.

I like puddle lights. They’re a great thing. However I really dislike yellow aged bulbs in puddle lights. Especially when new bulbs OR led bulbs are readily available. But instead when not go one better and get a full LED replacement light? Ahhh soothing. These are going to be fantastic at night.

They’re not genuine window switches, so once I know they work I’ll pop a link up. Was about $100 for the set 🙂 I will be doing the change of all the LEDs to make the green blue. Ultimately I will be flicking the factory headunit anyway - but that’s on hold until supply of aftermarket units improves. So I will have to do the headunit buttons also. Also have to do the blind control switch and the Start-Stop button. Steering wheel controls too. I have the LEDs here now, so really it’s about finding time to pull things apart, at the moment Sebastian is the only functioning vehicle in the house as I’m using Canberra’s snap lockdown to get a bunch of jobs done on my commuter (which involves amongst other things changing the instrument cluster from green to blue)

6x9, however they still need you (or installer) to cut a mounting plate to adapt from the factory hole to your speakers.

I’ve banged on about the lights a bit, and today snapped a quick photo to illustrate why. Green - never my favourite interior illumination colour. Then we have white and blue. Now the white I get. Yes technically blue or red would be better for night vision, but leaving that aside it’s the aesthetic thing. You design a white/blue cluster then put green steering wheel controls in front of it! The Gear position has a white LED in there now and is way nicer than the great it was. You can also see the blue halo around the Ciggie lighter. A very mellow LED blue bulb in there. Anyway enough of that until I pull some more of the car apart and change things. In the mean time some post arrived today. Illuminated window switches, RHD specific - these should be blue. If they’re the wrong blue I may have to change the LEDs in them to make a consistent theme through the car. Also got the boot puddle lights in LED form. These should be significantly better than the old T10 globes. And number plate lights.

Nope still there 🙂

Also, “modern” cars will become hypochondriacs as the batteries get old. If the battery voltage drops too low during engine cranking, sensors go “out of range” and well you get the start of the code tsunami. Incredibly common cause of “communication failure” messages…

One thing you’re all going to work out about me is that I really don’t like things being “she’ll be right”, or half…um…baked. That’s not to say that sometimes one has little to no choice, but for the most part we can choose to let things slide, or just fix them. One of my door switches is not like the other three. Holes and an uneven array of rubber gubbins make my OCD twitch. I don’t like it when that happens. $17 and 4 days late I have a bag of 10 gubbins. Ok they have a fancy Toyota name, but these are aftermarket equivalents from Febest. I now have a plugged hole and 9 gubbins in a baggie. This is a $4 door switch I paid $11 for so I wouldn’t have to wait forever for it to arrive. Instead of swapping switches to some random quality one, I popped the rubber cover off the new switch, and fitted it onto the Genuine Toyota switch in the car. Two small things that make me feel better inside and help me sleep at night.

Oh powerbulbs.com is generally good and well priced, but sometimes Amazon absolutely smashes a deal out of the park so check a few sellers 🙂. Mine came from Amazon for a decent saving.

KAA as you have Presara with HIDs you really do get a bit stuck with matching the other bulbs to them. I would jump on Powerbulbs.com and find a “H11” bulb that has a colour temperature above 5000K, from memory about 5300K is where most OEM HID bulbs are. So you want to be around that. You can do the same for the HB3 bulbs for the high beam. Keep in mind that halogens and LEDs in those colour temps are unlikely to be road legal. It’s a side effect of them needing more “filtering” of the light to pass the whiter/blue light and to have the higher light output promise they also don’t last as long. The WhiteVision I’ve just installed are 4300K, and are significantly nicer at night than regular globes, but nothing like HID. Celeste had the BiXenon adaptive cornering lights. They were magic. The Toyota courtesy light kit includes everything, well except the 16mm drill bit to mount the actual fittings. I’ll have a go at it on the weekend, probably a 2 hour job. I might grab a spare AC control unit and do the LED swap on that just so I can plug and play it.

Well that was a bust. Pulled a bunch of trim off to release the switch. Discover the “Parking sensor” switch is a generic item. Pull the original switch apart. solve my problem. Also new headlight bulbs - Just some Phillips WhiteVisions, cheap, legal and a decent improvement over “old” bulbs. They do degrade with time and the ones I removed were well past their prime. LEDs in the map lights now too. Just have to get (or more likely make) a panel for the courtesy light mid-roof.

The centre stack seems to be green only (GSV50 at least) and the window switches aren’t illuminated - I don’t think they ever were in AUDM cars, but the same switches appeared in other models internationally with illumination. It will be interesting to see if they just work or I have to play shenanigans with the loom in the doors. I’ll just pull the AC controls and change the LEDs on the circuit board, have already done the 5mm wedge lmao in the gear selector and Lighter. Blind button will have to be dismantled. Headunit is going in the skipbin eventually so I don’t know if I’ll bother, but same story as AC controls.

Did I mention I bought the footwell lighting kit? Again with the blue illumination while the console stack is green. I may have also bought illuminated window switches. That’s going to be an interesting conversion isn’t it? Even grabbed on of these in blue.

As a recent buyer of a circa 180Kkm Aurion I would throw the following suggestions: - Air Filter - Cabin filter - Oil & Filter - Spark Splugs - Coolant - Trans fluid and filter. Mine has full history, all with Toyota but the last major, and depending on how dates are played against mileage maybe one before. Its evident that the last major was not done completely so we are simply doing those items ourselves. Nominally it’s a $1200 service at the dealership. Sadly many workshops will stamp the book after doing just an oil change for minimal cost and kick the rest of the maintenance can another interval down the road. Eventually filters get too clogged or spark plugs break down and then that stuff gets caught up. Arguably that’s cheaper than servicing correctly. You can register your car in the “myToyota” app and get a lot of Toyota service history direct. Also www.toyotamanuals.com.au will give you the ability to read the owners and service manuals plus find service bulletins like the VVT oil pipe.

Yes I think Camry was the search term I used. Invoice grab below: Front end now that it’s not tipping into the outside front tyre as hard is a bit floaty, I might move to the softer setting and see how that goes. The turn-in and overall ability to position the car is so much better. We had the alignment done to factory to baseline from, and I think it will need half to one degree negative camber on the front as a minimum coupled with a little less toe-in. All we want is to sharpen that initial turn-in bite and have it able to follow through. Could play with rear toe a bit so it comes around more readily, but at the end of the day the long-legged tourer just needs to commit to a corner and be able to stick it. The out-of-box experience is that the outside front tyre overworks almost instantly, I think Toyota engineers aimed at a demographic stereotype and delivered a car that fell well short of chassis potential. All I can say is MX5 clubs can be incredibly political, and that was a lesson in “don’t do anything better than the anointed king/queen”. We did do the winner of the 100 Years of Aston Martin Concours - having learnt the tricks in the early 1990’s helping Jaguar Owners prep there are certain do’s and do nots which will always be a proud moment considering the car was also a daily driven and had done a 4000km road trip to the event!

Thanks 🙂 I was worried I may have been a bit prickly in my initial response on read back, I guess it comes about from being around the detailing game for near to 25 years. It paid for a lot of my uni years and ultimately for me these days is a side gig that pays for the car hobby. Over the years I’ve deviated through a few brands but they’re all (in the commercial arena) much of a muchness. The Chemguys V range of compounds are nice, as they are pretty much a hose-off cleanup, and 100% silicone and filler free. That said Blacklight is awesome smoke and mirrors on black paintwork if you aren’t coating it. Pick who didn’t apply the temporary sealant to both sides of the roof evenly? lol. I’ve done my stint doing show cars etc, got a few trophies for my own cars back then and helped others get theirs. I turned my back on that scene after being an experience at a concours event where our car/paintwork was deemed to be too good for the entered category and removed from judging. Anyway, I had some essential baked goods to pick up today (5km lockdown here in the ACT) and made the roundabouts count. It’s certainly evident Toyota cocked up the factory specification, the Sportivo bar should have been the default, and the Sportivo should have gotten a 18mm, and probably not have and the spring and damping rates fiddled as much as they did which just made them harsh and jittery compared the Commodore/Falcon sports suspension of the same era. Its a “HardRace” part and was in stock, delivered within a day or two for $318. Came with GSV40 and GSV50 bushes. https://www.hardracesuspension.com.au I bought direct but you can also source through a few resellers. Ultra Racing is about 3 weeks to a month away from having stock of their ARB making the choice easy given the adjustment and same-same pricing. The green illumination is getting to me. So I think we will be changing that.

Yeah, price was a massive factor. In the local market a 2008ish GSV40 Presara with about 150-200K on it will be in a dealers yard for near $15K. Being a March 2014 build Sebastian is barey past his 7th birthday, but has done higher than average kms. Basically doing 500km/week for most of his life he’s now just under the 190,000km mark. After the various on-costs of Auction buying, trucking and holding fees, plus the inevitable inspection, registration and stamp duty we are still well decently ahead, although arguably still paid too much. We have no need to put in bulk distance so within a year or three he will have “typical” mileage for his age. All true heavy (Aka old school) ceramic type coatings will fill micro-marring, and settle in low points. The trick, is to use a heavy application in the first pass. Let that flash off, then level with the second pass. Usual cross-hatch pattern etc. I’m not talking about filling completely, but rather like the old school Glazes, where the filling effect changes how light is reflected from the surface damage. You are left with a mark, but not one that shows up like crazy. Newer generation coatings don’t do this as well because they’re generally thinner, but they absolutely rock at gloss level, and offer better chemical resistance and life span. That’s why so often coatings are layered if the customer is willing to pay the $$. You have to remember most people are claiming two trips over a larger car with 30ml of liquid that has a solvent base. That’s not a lot and requires extremely even thin application from go to whoa so it’s never going to be allowed to be a filler of sorts. As for tooling, it’s a mixed assortment of DA and rotary. I prefer Hex Logic pads and generally use Chemguys compounds because they’re what I started with years ago. I used v34 on a Orange (Medium/Heavy cut) pad yesterday. Small throw DA and medium speed. This makes the process a bit slower, but on Sebastian it’s a bit of archeology, want it to be very steady and progressive, rather than V32 on a rotary. When I get around to finishing the job I’ll do a final cut over the whole body, touch up a few of the worse areas with an additional pass and then just a fine compound with a polishing pad over the whole thing to give a consistency to the final finish. Then it’s wash, ISO wipe and Ceramic. He won’t be perfect, but more than good enough.

LOL the swear filter picked up the **** in the word co****r. So imagine I a C word that has an A word jammed in the middle 🙂

But let’s talk about paint. Artistically sideways but it doesn’t matter. When he arrived he didn’t look that bad, but 4 washes with a sealant/wax/glaze stripping agent, then an iron decontamination and Claying reveal all. The swirls are terrible. There’s signs of lots of small touchups done with brushes, and I almost think maybe he went through a hedge once. First peg off a typically bad spot. Dig out the tools and have a play. Yep, there’s enough clear to work with, and it’s working well with a relatively mild approach. A “medium” cut pad, and some diminishing compound. The great thing about diminishing compounds is as they work the abrasive breaks down and becomes finer, this can be moderated with moisture, but only so much. If there’s not enough cut, generally you grab a heavier grade, or use a forced rotation machine. Anyway this first cut told me what I needed to know. There’s hope. So it’s two proper cutting passes, at that point swirls are largely mitigated, deeper scratches minimised, and critically the metallic is really starting to come out. Now before I go on. I am NOT trying to “correct” this paint to a mirror, flawless finish. It’s too far gone for that, there’s too many deeper scratches and touchups. Too many? Well here’s the thing, if you look at a car that’s more than a few years old and you see swirls you know there’s a paint-care hygiene issue (although they aren’t avoidable over time), but when you see touchups, really deep scratches and NO other damage you pretty much assume the paintwork has been cut to within a micron of its life. In my view our cars should age like we do, they pick up scars of life, the echos of adventure and automotive escapades, and while there’s no excuse for looking shabby, there’s nothing wrong with looking like you’ve travelled. Stretch the test across the bonnet. Artisitic phone obviously wants you to see where a cat, dog or possum has tried to climb the bonnet ridge. These will soften further with the finishing polish, but they’re not going away easily. And then get carried away. Admittedly there’s some more to be done on the pillar at least but again this was only an initial “take the worse off” go. In a week or two I’ll pencil in a decent enough chunk of time to roll him into the garage, do the final polish and the. He’s getting at least two applications of a decent all-round ceramic coat. The final polish will more than anything take out the imperfections from the co****r treatment today, plus it’s safe for running in the lights, B pillar plastics and so on. The ceramic will also fill and somewhat hide some of the heavier marring and give the paint protection for about 2 years if I keep up the basic maintenance. Sebastian lives outside with Chilly (my commuter hack).

Sebastian is a Prodigy, bought because we needed a long-legged distance car, and to be honest after spending $2k on hire cars in the last 12 months and another $1k booking in a couple months we started to realise that not having a tourer was starting to bite. But just because we want touring doesn’t mean we don’t want some cornering. Step one was decent tyres and alignment, step was ordered before he got here. Whats metallic blue, has two position adjustment and is 19mm round? A quick wrestle around the exhaust and body roll should be moderated somewhat. We can still look at dialling the suspension in a bit more, considering the other cars in the household are nimble little things Sebastian can have some poise, but he’s not getting away with being a “boat”.

I mention Celeste because she was also black, and as someone who cleans cars for money (amongst other things) you really can’t own a black car and have it look like most people’s black cars. Bad marketing and all that. Obviously I will have 7 years of swirl inducing paint trauma to minimise. No not correct, there’s no way Sebastian warrants the whole enchilada, but we do want him to look nice. Oh - I guess my good deed of “let’s put in new FOB batteries” deserved punishment. yeah, more filth. 10 minutes alter clean FOBs and another thing done that I didn’t think I’d need to do. Some before/after shots. Nothing tricky or difficult. Just effort. Even the headliner needed careful attention - I started in the back and worked forwards, as you can see by the demarcation line. Fresh mats all round and new boot liner finish the interior off- only after carpet shampooing and a lot of leather conditioner on the seats.

I bought Sebastian via an auction, not one of those fancy ones with great pictures, mechanical inspections and a consumer friendly system, but rather the ones where dealers flip less desirable trade-ins, cars that have sat in stock too long, or don’t scrub up so good. So I knew when he arrived on the back of the truck that I’d been doing some work. In the past few weeks I’ve been chipping away on him. And I guess he’s starting to feel more like a family member rather than an interloper on the driveway. He rode on the top deck from Sydney! First time we saw him in the metal was being dumped outside Pickles Canberra. He came with 5 tyres (handy) representing 4 different brands. This has subsequently been addressed with a set of Continental EcoContact EC6. With an alignment and the new rubber things are much more pleasant. The interior has some interesting wear. Obviously a lot of flat-packs or something were stuffed through the spilt food seats! The balance between human slime, filth and oddities like the cubby lid being so jammed with coins that it wouldn’t open. In the end I had to remove the console to empty to out. $14.25 is a nice return. Don't believe the human slime? After cleaning the interior of 4 doors this was my bucket of rinse water. Service history is pretty good, with Toyota for the vast majority. However not that long ago (May) he had a major service, one where the spark plugs should have been done. The lack of finger prints suggests otherwise. Oh well, plugs are cheap and we will run through and redo the service items from the major. As his history is pretty good I’ll alternate DIY interim servicing with legit stamped services where things are definitely done. The other thing. Oh man. I remembered why I love and hate black cars. Sebastian is replacing Celeste (not a Toyota) who sadly was written off in January last year in Canberra’s “Hail event”. My little commuter hot-hatch is just too small for the longer trips we make - well in the few months between COVID closing half the country it seems.

“With the correct ISO adapters”. True, and if Aerpro are on their game with Toyota stuff you are correct. I did make an error in my first post, the DMX820WS is a 200mm Toyota fitment with regular Kenwood plug on the back. The DMX820WXS is a 230mm Toyota fitment with Toyota wiring connections. 230mm doesn’t have an available fascia for the GSV50. However coming from doing this with other brands there’s always been a tweak or fiddle required to get the integration because someone decided not to include a wire or two (handbrake detection and reverse detection being quite common) in the conversion loom even when the wiring is in the vehicle factory plugs. So I’ve been burnt before. Without talking myself up too much I do a lot vehicle wiring in the CANBUS and engine management space so probably I’m transferring a bit of the desire to know more details rather than taking some things on trust 🙂 Going more conventional Kenwood for example Double DIN (or the non-Toyota Harness 200mm unit) means it’s: Fascia: Aerpro FP8052 ($75 to $100) Wiring Kit: CHTO15C (because it has all the factory to aftermarket adapters, including Steering Control, $150 to $200) Headunit Wiring would be the APP9KE6 $20 - change to a different brand headunit and they’re still generally $20. So roughly $275 to use factory camera, retain factory AUX Audio/USB plugs and make 99% of this plug and play. I guess it’s “choose headunit options” time