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Griffin iPod magic Apr 20, 2007
When you grow accustomed to stereos that can play MP3s by the hundreds right off the disc, going back to a normal format with fewer than 20 songs per disc is pretty frustrating. Teenagers seem pretty on the ball, and they like their portable MP3 players, so why shouldn’t we?
Actually, Scott is the last member of the staff to give in to the portable MP3 craze—JG had a mount on his scooter, for goodness sake. And despite Scott’s loathing of most things Apple, he wasn’t too stubborn to recognize that the iPod is still the superior product on the market. Especially if you want to do anything with it other than listen to the headphones.
Since Toyota/Lexus won’t let go of the tape deck, we did have a nice alternative to tearing apart the dash and cutting wires to make an auxiliary input for sound. The Griffin TuneFlex provided the rest of the solution.
The TuneFlex is an all-in one mount/charger/tape deck adapter that runs about $50. Plug the unit into a spare cigarette lighter (or accessory jack if you got screwed out of a proper fire-creation device) and slide the tape adapter into the proper hole in your dashboard. If you did it right you’ll have tunes by the gigabyte.
The TuneFlex has two output levels, and on our stereo both were actually too strong, with distortion on the high notes. Switching the tape adapter to the iPod’s volume-adjustable output (set to about 50 percent volume) did the trick.
When we put the unit in we noticed that the TuneFlex dock was almost exactly the same width as the IS 300’s ashtray housing. The temptation to fiddle was too strong. Unfortunately for this application, the TuneFlex’s robust support hose was too rigid to bend in the way we needed. We broke out the diagonal cutters and carefully clipped the mild steel coil and then the VERY strong spring steel coil. A Dremel with a fiberglass cut-off wheel made short work of the plastic swivel where the support hose was glued into the adapter.
After wrapping electrical tape around the bits that were exposed by the surgery, we had a cool, low-key mount for our iPod. When we flicked on the headlights we got a pleasant surprise; the ashtray had a light in it, and that light was illuminating the clear TuneFlex mount. For some reason we have a color wheel of theater lighting samples, so we picked the one that most closely matched the OEM orange lighting and cut out a bit of the transparency to tape over the light. We’re going to add a second layer of diffuser to keep it from being so bright, but it was a happy surprise.
Right now some high-density foam keeps it in place, but we’ll cut up a wood block and mount it more firmly when we get the urge.
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