|
|
UPDATE
I finally got back into the shop so the camera could be mounted into the lowermost portion of the front spoiler. Its now mounted on a custom steel bracket directly onto the bumper. Camera view is now completely unobstructed.
Watch the Video (4.8mb, 640x480 with sound) |
My most recent modification was actually one of my earlier ones... it just took until July to get done. I'll explain...
 Before I put the Eibach springs on it was obvious that curbs were already not my friend. The Dodge Magnum had barely enough clearance to make it over a parking lot bumper stop. After the Eibach Pro-Kit went on -- and it eventually settled to a 1.75" drop -- it became obvious my problem was now serious as, basically, there is no curb or bumper stop that I have a prayer of clearing.
Compounding the matter, the Dodge Magnum has a fairly monolithic front end, and if thats not bad enough my depth perception sucks. As a result I usually wound up parking 3 feet or so from everything, which in turn leaves the Magnum's ass end hanging out into the traffic lane. If thats not bad enough, I knew that while I was slowly getting better at guesstimating how close I could come (which seemed to mean I would either be 2 feet away from something or 1 inch away, but never anything in between), sooner or later I would definitely screw up, and that mistake would be godawfully inconvenient and expensive.
So I had an idea. What if I put a camera down there so I could see how far away from disaster I was? I could install a monitor in the cockpit and off I'd go. Someone had to have a kit for that already made up, right?
WRONG!
While there are front parking sensor kits (apparently used mostly in Europe) no one appears to have thought of putting a camera up front before, or more accurately not like this and certainly no one -- yet, anyway -- is marketing a commercial product. As such the work is all custom. Wonderful.
The first step was installation of a high-resolution color camera. Basically my installer took a backup camera and wired it up low in the front instead of out the back. More on why I bring that up later. The camera was the easy part. Or so we thought.
Vastly more difficult was the screen in the cockpit. See, we originally settled on a very nice 5 1/4" diagonal LCD screen. The idea was to put it into the driver's side sun visor. How slick is that? Very. Unfortunately it turns out the Dodge Magnum's visor is manufactured differently than your typical auto visor. Its made better, basically. Not some cheap piece of cardboard, its a fairly solid hunk o' plastic under that cloth and padding. This construction torpedoed our original attempt to embed the screen into the visor itself.
Next was an attempt to use an aftermarket visor that already had a screen built into it. It was sent out to an upholsterer to match the fabric of the Magnum. When done we put it in and... it looked like crap. The installer actually never let me see it installed. He just told me he wouldn't put it into his car looking like that and we went to Plan C.
 We stepped up to DaimlerChrysler and bought another visor (the original having died a horrid death during Plan A). Now the install would be a surface mount on the visor. We'd mount a frame onto the face of it, then mount the screen onto the frame. And we'd have to hope the visor closed up onto the roof again.
Plan C worked out great, and the look of it is pretty well stock. The visor closes to the roof just fine and is barely noticeable. The little dark brown dots you see at the four corners of the screen are felt furniture 'feet' that I picked up at Home Depot and stuck on as a safeguard against the monitor eventually causing wear on the headliner. No idea if they will actually do that, or whether they are a solution looking for a problem.
About That Camera...
In the picture of the video output the view is a bit truncated at bottom... thats the horizontal cross-piece of the front spoiler blocking the camera view. Turns out the camera install wasn't as simple as was first thought. The original bracket that came with the backup camera was really not long enough to do the job. Originally it was put into the top portion of the spoiler, jammed up against the styrofoam inside (you knew that the interior of the front clip is loaded with black styrofoam, right?) at the top, where it also just barely was obstructed by the spoiler crosspiece.
The shop's solution to this final problem was to fabricate a custom bracket and bring the car back in. Now, the camera is mounted LOW in the front bottom-most portion of the spoiler, where it gets the absolute best possible view. It is rock-solid as it is mounted directly to the bumper. You can now pull up within an inch of the curb if you are really brave, but the easiest and best thing to do is not to push your luck, and use the tool for what it was meant for. I can pull within 6 inches of any curb-stop now with ease and without worrying about whether I'm about to buy myself a new front end.
And as long as we're talking about the camera, one thing it took me a few minutes to notice is that everything is reversed! Turns out a backup camera is designed to reverse the image just as your rear-view mirror does. This has no bearing on the quality of the job it does but it was a little weird when I first noticed it. ... and its Yet Another Reason why you should never, EVER use this thing to drive with. Another reason is the camera is so close to the ground it looks like you are going 50mph when you are only going 5... You can imagine how fast it looks going 50...
|
Personal BS
