Top suspension mount replacement - Chrysler Grand Voyager

This is a set of steps and some photos of replacing the top suspension mount in a Chrysler Grand Voyager 2.8CRD 2005 edition. This process should be the same all the way up to the 2007 edition (As far as I'm aware) as these models all share similar front suspension components.

Symptoms, I suspected these were faulty for a while as I had a clunk when steering. About every 1/4 revolution of the steering wheel I'd hear a thuuuunnnggg, a thump that reverberated through the spring (I was guessing) so my assumption was either the bearings had seized up and were slipping at times, or there was something else wrong. Well whilst away on holiday recently one of the top suspension mounts completely collapsed! It made a real rattle and thumping noise whilst moving, especially on uneven roads. Taking the wheel off didn't reveal anything, but looking from the top you could see the damage easily. (You have to take the whole windscreen wiper assembly off to see the top of the struts/suspension mounts)
Here is the damaged top view:

The strut is sticking right up through the mount. To compare, here is the other side:

So, to replace them, order the parts (Eurocarparts did the job for me, decent price and all were in stock too).
Then the process of taking it out, you will need a set (or two) of spring compressors for this job. This isn't an easy job, so one you'll need to plan and have time to do, especially if you hit the problems I did, as you'll see.

Jack the side of the car up, and secure it with axle stands. There is NO excuse not to have these for doing these jobs, they are cheap from Halfords or most car places and will save you. Please buy some as they are key to your safety!
Firstly, take the wheel off and loosen (don't remove) the two main bolts holding the suspension to the wheel hub.

Here you can see where I've taken both nuts off the bolts. These were VERY difficult on both sides on mine, we had to use large breaker bars and a lot of heat. In the end two needed CUT off as they were so well fastened on. So this would be a good idea to have replacements ready. We got ours from a bolt/ironmongers so they weren't Chrysler/Mopar original parts but were very close (and high tensile, ensure you match as close as possible to factory). Once these were off/loose we could move onto the rest of the job. The anti-roll bar joint needed removing, this is on a nut, and around the back there is a slight groove cut into the metal so you can grip it with a molerench or similar.

That's it removed and free floating. You might need to lever it up/down so the pressure is released from it first.

Now move onto the top, so first you need to remove the wipers (small plastic cover hides the larger nut that holds the wiper on), when you pull the wipers off you might need to gently prise them, mine needed quite a considerable force to come off the wiper motor splines. Once off you take the top plastic wiper cover off using a star screwdriver, disconnect the water feed pipe (to the left of the engine, just a push fit connector) and then lift the whole piece out of the way.
Then disconnect the wiper motor power cable (to the right, just above the battery) and start to remove the main wiper tray assembly.
This is held on by two sets of fasteners, the first is at the top of this picture, where the upside down U shape metal brackets meet the bottom of the windscreen there are small nuts, undo all of these.

Then there are four large bolts fastening the whole piece into the bodywork. Here is the hole for one of them this is the far left side just behind where the wiper arm would sit on top of the splines (just visible top of photo)

Once out, lift out the entire motor assembly.
Now the tricky bit! You need to loosen the nut/spindle pair at the top of the suspension mount. This will make it easier later when you have to remove it and it's out of the car.
For this you need a bit of luck when it comes to what tools you have. In our case we used a spark plug socket, and then a smaller hexagonal tool. There may be a 'proper' item to do this, but see what you have available to you. This is what it looked like in place:

And a close-up of the tools we used, hopefully you can match what you need also

We just need to loosen this slightly, don't undo it completely!
Once you've done that, you can loosen the three main nuts that hold the suspension mount in place (you can see two of them in the above picture).
Then return to the wheel arch, remove the two main bolts and get one person ready to 'catch' the suspension, the other undo the 3 nuts from the top. You should then be able to freely drop the suspension out of the arch and take it out.

The next step is to compress the spring. You'll need some decent spring compressors, these springs are relatively short and dumpy, so getting a good purchase on with the spring compressors is vital.

Here is what it looks like with our spring compressors on and tensioned. We compressed more than you can see in this photo:

The way we 'tested' to see if we had enough compression was to grab the top suspension mount and tried to spin/move it. At first it wouldn't move, slowly as we compressed it, it started to free and spin. Once it could spin freely we then removed the top nut that was holding the suspension mount in place. Do this carefully. If there is tension it will fly off, so make sure it doesn't have pressure on it.

Once removed the underside of the suspension mount looks like this. The inner (lighter colour) part is the compression bearing and is removable which leaves the suspension mount, and the faulty part in my case. It wasn't really obvious, but underneath the compression bearing is a piece of metal (like a large washer welded into place, but one piece of metal no welds!) This is the weak point, and in my case although it looked in-tact, one tap with a hammer and it dropped out! So it was clearly weak, one side had given way on me, the other was near to falling out too! So take note. I'm on 113,000 miles. Maybe yours needs done too!
After that, it's a re-assembly. Put the new together (you'll see below, the new compression bearing sat in the right place ready)

Place on top of the suspension spring (make sure you line up the spring and rubber parts so they all sit in their correct markings), and if you've compressed the spring enough, you'll be able to drop the nut on the top and tighten it slightly. If you can't, then compress the spring more until you can. Once that's in and secure (tighten the nut down as far as you can so it is tight/holding tension) then you can start to release the spring compressors.

The re-insertion is just the reverse of the above, push it into the wheel arch into position and fasten with the three nuts at the top. Fasten the suspension to the wheel hub and reverse the process to put it all back together.

In my case, this totally removed the thump when steering, so clearly this was causing the issue.
What this does NOT fix is creaking when you go over bumps or uneven ground. Creaking noises I suspect are anti-rollbar joints/bearings/bushes that are worn and will be my next challenge.

I hope this helps, please do provide feedback or comments on it and I hope this will help you.

12v LED indicator bulbs for Chrysler grand voyager

A short post this one, but I noticed the orange colour was fading from my rear indicators on my Chrysler Grand Voyager.

This is a common problem on many cars now, as they use clear lenses and an orange bulb to make the indicator orange. This 'solution' to me is flawed and since its the bulbs with an orange paint on them, over time the pain burns off/fades which is what happened with mine and the indicator now looks white rather than orange (This is an MOT fail here in the UK, and as my MOT is due I needed to sort it)

So I found these LEDs on an ebay listing

They are ORANGE 581 BAU15s PY21 replacement LED bulbs in the same package, etc.

One warning that I saw on the Chrysler Grand Voyager forums is that the voyagers electrical wiring is non-standard and actually has positive on the surround and negative on the central pin. On normal bulbs this isn't a problem as they don't care about polarity, but LED's require + and - polarity so this could have been an issue.

I did a test with my multimeter on the pins and verified that this was NOT the case though, the central pin was positive like on all other vehicles as standard, so first issue out of the way.

The bulbs fit into the holders fine, and then into the external bulb/reflectors fine too, so these are the right size and shape.

Testing them with the hazard indicators on, all looks good, swapped them and they were blinking away and brightness looked ok (I did expect a little brighter to be honest, but they were comparable to the existing ones).

So all was well.

Until the next day when I actually drove to work, and realised that when I put the indicators on I got the dreaded 'fast flash' or hyperflash as some people call it. This is where the indicator bulbs flash very quickly. Most cars were designed to have a load from the bulbs and this allowed them to flash at a normal pace. When a short or an open circuit (bulb failure) was detected, the current consumed dropped and this causes the flasher unit to flash faster, the idea being that it was then easy to tell when a bulb had failed and needed replacing.

Unfortunately the LEDs consume a lot less current than the original bulbs and so this was causing the circuit to think the bulb was missing, when in fact all the bulbs and LEDs were lighting up correctly.

Doing a bit of maths I can calculate the difference.

These are 24LED units, and assuming an LED voltage of 2v for orange and estimating at 25mA per LED, adding that up we get 0.05 watts at 2v per LED. Multiple by 24 and we get 1.2 watts in total.

The usual bulb consumes 21 watts, so there is a difference of 19.8 watts, which is quite significant and obviously what the car is detecting and causing the fast flash.

There is a solution, this is to use a load resistor. This is effectively a resistor across the terminals (shunting the voltage/power through the resistor as well as the LED) which causes a higher current to flow and the indicator circuit to think it has a valid bulb installed.

This has several problems for me, firstly it's a waste. We would be wasting current shunting it through a resistor effectively wasting this current through heating the resistor up. Secondly you have to cut into the wiring loom and install this load resistor which is untidy and messy. I'm also not sure if this will stop the bulb sensing for the other bulbs in the indicator circuit (I only swapped the rear to LED, front are still standard). So this to me isn't a good solution.

I still did the maths to calculate what resistor I'd need.

So for 19watts at 12v this is 1.58 amps.

So using Ohms law (V = ir) I could calculate the resistor size. So 12 = 1.58R, and calculating that it comes out at 8.2 Ω (Ohms)

So if I were to install a load resistor it would need to be an 8.2 Ohm 19 (or 20) watt resistor. (Which are the larger ceramic style rectangular units as they are dissipating so much wattage)

Therefore I'm thinking of swapping and going back to the regular bulbs rather than LEDs as don't think this solution is quite right. I'm open to comments though, please let me know your thoughts.

Dashcam/Reversing camera to Chrysler Grand Voyager - part 2

Briefly to complete my installation of the dashcam/reversing camera to my Chrysler Grand Voyager, I wanted to connect up the 12v 'sense' wires that are attached to the rear camera. These will then switch the screen on and set it to reverse mode (the reversing camera full screen), so I set about trying to connect these up.
The exterior light cluster on the GV comes out quite easily, two clips and the whole assembly pops out, and again the lights pop out from a clip, I can then see the wiring harness disappear into the chassis, typically further back than I'd hoped, so not within easy reach to any of the edges of the plastic boot covers.
So I set about taking the majority of the left-hand plastic covers off. This is additionally difficult as it has the boot opener/closer motor fitted to the chassis, so the plastic covers wouldn't come off completely as I'd need to disconnect the boot motor, which I didn't want to attempt.
So initially you have to take the boot tray/sill off, which is shown below. Just prise it up from one side as it has metal pop-clips on it, and comes off quite easily.

Then, unscrew the two retaining clips (These are what I assume support a boot cover if you have one too, they are crosshead screws inside), then start to prise off the side plastic panel:

These pop open from the back, and you have to slightly lift when doing that as they sit down onto retaining clips. This is quite tricky, as there are so many parts to this piece of plastic. It's a one-piece that goes from the base of the boot, up around the boot motor, round into the car and contains the rear window motor assembly and also the rear speakers, so quite a large piece of plastic with many shapes and fasteners.
I found that this was about as far as I could get, so could just move the plastic around and bend it slightly, just enough to get inside to route the wires and figure out whats going on.

I then discovered several odd things. The first was that a control box had been mounted inside the bodywork, and had a whole heap of wires coming out of it. Then, I noticed one of the wires from the main car wiring loom had been cut, extended and then joined into this black control box. The extension wire you can just see on the photo below, it's the red closest on the picture.

This had been black-taped at the joins, which always makes me think after-market fitting/work, basically because that's something I'd have done! After continuing with the job in hand, I started to test and trace for the cable connected to reverse lights, and found it's white with a light-green stripe. Sure enough, this is the wire that had been cut and extended as shown in the above photo, so now I know what this box was (probably), reversing sensors.

I'd always assumed the reversing sensors on my GV were factory fit, the sensors certainly looked it, and the module was sensibly fitted (It's a small black round circle with about 3 or 4 LEDs from green to red), but perhaps not! So anyway, this meant I could take another branch off this wire and use it for my reverse sense wire.

Wiring that in, the system worked great, when I select reverse the camera switches over and displays on the rear view mirror.

Fitting and wiring a dashcam to my Chrysler Grand Voyager

A few tips and guides from when I fitted a dashcam to my Chrysler Grand Voyager. The dashcam I decided on was a cheap chinese import, It's a Buyee HD 1080p 4.3" Dual lens Mirror dashcam.
Below is the product information from ebay (It was around £30 which seemed a cheap enough price to play around with!)

The idea is you clip the unit over your existing rear view mirror. Normally (when it's screen is off, which is most of the time) the unit is reflective so it acts like a normal mirror. The mirror finish is good, and my only comment would be it's a little 'blue' in it's reflection, but this is pretty good, so as a rear view mirror, no problems.
The power to it is via a supplied 12v cigarette style power plug, which has a really nice long power cable on it so you can thread it around the car. It also comes with a small rear-view camera to put at the back of your car for additional recording, and it also acts as a reversing camera (and has a 12v sensing cable to connect to reverse lights so the screen switches on and flicks to view this when it reverse).
Fastening it around the Chrysler mirror was fine, the mirror was about the same size (and the Chrysler mirror is large) and the camera pops out the side quite nicely (The camera is to the left of the back of the mirror). The issue here is I think this was designed for left-hand-drive, and so the camera swivel on it's mount wasn't quite good enough, I viewed more of the left pavement than of the right of the road (it was fine, but just not covering the right of the road as much as I wanted).
So I therefore decided to install the mirror upside down! This means that all menus, etc, are upside down, and the images recorded were upside down, but it had a better field of vision. I might look to open the unit up and flip the camera at some point, but not yet!

So now onto fitting the cables. Luckily along the top of the front windscreen it is just soft foam padding to the roof so gently pushing the cable up and hiding it was easy. At the left door pillar, same again just gently prise the rubber and plastic fittings and there is plenty room to put the cables in (one for power, one for rear view camera). Once above the passenger left hand door I left the camera cable there, as I was going to take the rear camera cable along the top of the car.
The power, I then fed down the pillar, again just gently hiding it behind the plastic pillar cover, and down towards the glovebox. At the left just above the glovebox was a plastic cover, prising this open (It has those metal pop-clips, so fine to prise open gently) let me feed the cable in and behind the glovebox (Glovebox, open it, gently squeeze the limiters and it drops fully open revealing behind it)
This is the view when the glovebox is completely dropped open (down towards the bottom of the picture).
You can see to the left the black cable is the dashcam power cable I was threading through.

Pass the cable straight through, then onto the hard part, into the base of the centre console (where the old tape storage box was on these cars).
What I was going to do was put a cigarette socket inside this storage box at the base of the centre console, and wire that into the current cigarette lighter socket that was operated via the ignition. Therefore the dashcam would automatically switch on when ignition on, and then off again when off.
I took most of the centre console panels apart (Removing the 'wooden' fascia by taking the top two screws out and prising it out). Here is the cigarette lighter socket removed:

To remove it, you can just about see the small push in clips. So with a flat screwdriver head, gently push this into the top of the socket, between the black plastic and the grey dashboard surround. You should be able to prise it out and it'll drop out like you see here.

Pull it out and you see the connector at the back. Press the release button and the connector comes out. Then I found the problem, this cable is really tight and not much spare. Trying to trace the wire drew a blank, it's in a harness that goes round the right hand side of the radio and I suspect straight to the ignition wires (or at least that harness) so getting 'spare' wire doesn't look an option. I therefore decided to take the whole plastic connector apart and solder straight onto it. The connector comes apart easily, sliding the metal contacts out, I was then able to solder on my wires and a bit of electrical tape for good measure. It ended up looking like this:

However, if you do the same thing, make sure the solder and electrical tape is tight (not like mine!) as when you come to push the connectors back on, they'll struggle as they're too wide for the connector. After a struggle that went back on, and so did the cigarette lighter socket. Testing each time, and all the way to ensure polarity is correct, etc. All looked good. So I know had my extension sockets in the lower tape compartment powering on and off with the ignition.

The socket I chose was also from ebay and was around £3 which included two sockets and usb charging sockets on them too, you can never have too many charging sockets!
All I did then was plug in the dashcam cable to the socket and it was ready to go!

Wiring the rear camera was more of a challenge, mainly because of the wiring route I had to take. I'll need to update this with photos and more info when I can but it got dark so I gave up for the day.
In brief, I ran the cable over the top of the passenger door, round the pillar plastic cover and along the top of the rear sliding door. Again just gently prising it into the gap from the rubber seal as there is a generous amount of space behind these without compromising the seal. Round the very rear window, and up to the roof again, then to the boot. I screwed the camera into the grey plastic of the boot lid so it was sat at the top of the boot window. It was pretty small and not obvious which was ideal.

The next problem was to connect into the reverse lights. The camera cable branches off and gives you a red+black cable to run for this. I prised the plastic around the left rear speaker (just below the electric window housing). I found the hard way, this plastic does prise apart, but it should be removed by sliding outwards, towards the boot. I think, as this is an entire plastic component you are supposed to take the whole piece out together (including the plastic cover around the boot opener, etc), but I just forced it and ended up almost snapping (and bending) the plastic retaining clips. That way, I managed to feed the cable down towards the jack stowage locker.

(red and black wire on the photo above just hanging at the moment, this is the sense wire for the dashcam for when reverse is engaged)

That's as far as I've got, taking the rear light cluster out I found nothing more than a small cable and rubber fitting going into the body, no easy/big access hole to feed the cable to! So I suspect I am going to have to remove more of the whole plastic covers at the rear to get to this, so that's a job for another day.

But for now, I'm happy with the job, the unit powers on and starts recording when ignition goes on, and the view from front and rear cameras is ideal!

Get in touch if you'd like any specific details, etc, or to let me know if you've given it a go too!

Chrysler Grand Voyager - Sound System quandry

So, I'm back trying to add in my Parrot bluetooth phone kit into my Chrysler Grand Voyager (2004). This has hit upon several big obstacles, the first of which, nobody online (Manufacturers, suppliers, etc) can decide on what the correct kit is needed for this car, some say SOT-046 some say SOT-086 and others say SOT-948. So I checked, and in the past I'd bought the SOT-046 (For my last Chrysler Grand Voyager 2004) so bought another one the same.
However this time it didn't work out, connecting it in, all went well, however the unit when trying to play audio through the speakers simply slightly muted the audio and no phone/Parrot audio at all.

I did a lot of digging, checking wiring diagrams, cabling, etc, and came to the conclusion it must be the wrong cable, so went and tried others, but all gave the same problem, that it didn't fully mute the radio and no audio at all went through.

Next step, I cut the cables on one of the SOT-046 cables and started to do my own testing, firstly by trying a manual connection from the radio to the car audio harness. This is when I started to find something strange. Disconnecting all the audio output cables (Verifying the wiring diagram online and on the Parrot wiring diagrams, so at least these added up) from the radio, and trying by connecting just one (Driver side right) pair. This didn't result in any audio output at all. Strange! I then tried each of the other pairs, checking polarity (Front left, Rear left, Rear Right) and none of them worked. I was now really confused. So connected them all back up again and they all started working. So it wasn't a fault, but almost by design. This makes me think (I already suspected this) that there is an amplifier somewhere in the car to drive all the speakers (8 speakers in total!) which is sometimes referred to as the Infinity sound system. I then tried connecting all speaker pairs up again and then disconnected a single one whilst the system was still on, and strangely that speaker didn't totally go quiet, it lost a little volume but not totally. Swapping which wires were connected or not seemed to produce similar results, but again disconnecting a single pair didn't stop a speaker from working. This confirmed what I suspected, these aren't true line-level outputs to an amp, they are more a digital output per channel.
This is my assumption anyway, and if this is truly the case then I'm going to struggle to feed in the analogue audio from the Parrot phone system.

Therefore a bit more investigation is needed I suspect, but that's my findings so far!

Removing dashboard/console/speedo from Chrysler Grand Voyager

This is a break from my normal blog posts, but I'm going to be adding a few car information posts, since I've not bought another of my favourite cars of all time, the Chrysler Grand Voyager. This huge people carrier (7 seats) is a nice comfy big bulk of a car but has loads of gadgets and is just a really nice car to drive!

So onto the tutorial, I found that the speedometer, rev counter, etc, weren't illuminated at night, so looks like the bulbs were out, so to remove it here are the few simple steps. It didn't take long and is nice and straight forward.
First, there is a plastic cover at the base which exposes two of the first screws, this simply pops up so just apply a little force to the centre of this panel:

As you can see, I've popped that up on mine already. Be careful, the UK edition has that LED embedded which is the engine immobiliser light. The leads on it aren't very long, so don't pull the cover off too quickly.
Looking underneath you'll see the LED is on a small connector, so you can take each leg/lead off. Make sure you mark/make a note which colour lead onto which leg as LEDs are sensitive to polarity (+ and -) so make sure you put them back on the right way round!

LED on mine has yellow and grey leads, so I simply removed the grey lead and wrapped that leg on the LED in white electrician tape.

Remove that cover now and put it out of the way. You've then exposed all 4 screws (the top two screws are obvious)

All four are cross-head (otherwise know as Phillips) screws, so nice and easy. Once out you can remove the plastic facia. This is a little tricky due to it's size and the steering wheel getting in the way, it is slightly flexible so let it flex and eventually it'll come out.

There are then 4 screws at each corner of the panel, each of these are cross-head. Careful when you remove them, try not to let them drop. I did with one of mine and luckily it rattled it's way down and out the bottom into the footwell, but I think I was lucky!

After you've removed all four you can then gently start to move the whole panel towards you. The cable/connector for the panel is along the top near the middle, so pull it towards you slightly so you can see it. It uses the standard Chrysler GV connectors where you slide the red tab before you can press the release on it and tease it out. Try to get the connector out in one swift action. I didn't on my first attempt and the car started to light up a lot of panel lights randomly (Ignition off and key out, obviously) so be careful as I'd not want to do that too often in case it confused it!
Once disconnected you can remove the whole panel. Here is the back of the panel for reference and you can see the main connector just offset from the middle slightly.

(As an aside, you can see why my panel illumination doesn't work. There are no bulbs or even fittings where they should be! These are PC74 lights+fittings for reference)

Fitting it all back together is pretty much the reverse. It's not a complex/tricky job, but hope this helps.