VXOC Astra-J/GTC

Been browsing this website for a bit now, and since I've got a few plans I figured it'd be cool to keep a progress log of whatever I'll do to the car. It's not an Astra like most of you guys drive, it's not a right-hand drive either and in fact it's not even a Vauxhall but I still hope I'm welcome


So that's her, exchanged my SEAT Leon MK1 for this 2009 Opel, a 09 plate equivalent if I'm not mistaken. Engine is a 2.0 CDTI as I drive a fair bit. 

Factory options are pretty okay, it's got DVD800 navi and bluetooth, park distance sensors front and rear. It's also lacking a few options that I want, so I'm looking into adding whatever's feasible

For now, plans include:
- getting proper wheels, gonna be looking for some 18"s once the current ones are used up
- remap; I'm close to the German border and supposedly they're pretty good at that stuff
- sound system upgrade; I've took most of the good stuff from the SEAT
- installing fog lights; I've got all the materials for it sourced
- replace the DVD800 with an android-capable unit; gonna build some custom electronics so DVD800 panel works

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First step in preparing for the audio upgrade was to add a killswitch.
Looking at the battery department, it's gotta go either between their the positive pole and fusebox, or I'll have to put it near the negative somehow.


Since there's 2 wires going from the negative side I opted to install it on the positive. The downside of this is that the contacts of the killswitch may absolutely not touch the chassis, so that's why if possible placing it on the negative side is prefered.

Luckily there's just enough space between the battery and the fusebox for the killswitch to sit in and there's no chassis/ground in the vicinity, so we've found a good spot:


To be safe, I wrapped it with enough isolating tape so that in the event of a collision, even if the switch moves and touches the chassis somewhere, there's a good probability it still won't short out.


All good, now I just had to cut away some plastic in the original battery cover so that it closes properly. It got pretty dark by now so I'll leave the proper filing for tomorrow, but here's a pic:

Also might be worth an idea joining https://insignia-drivers.uk as that is more catered to your car.

Good call raimon, been reading there for a bit but am liking this place a tad more honestly.
Was planning to fit the front fogs today but needed the car for an errand in the afternoon so I postponed that till Thursday (public holiday) instead.

Instead I did some cabling preparations for my equalizer and RCA cables for the monoblocks that I'll be fitting soonish.

Took out the glove compartment and found that it won't be possible cut out a slot for the whole thing because the a/c motor is right behind it. I did find some empty space next to where a hump holding up the glove box. Little to the right of that seemed to have ample space for the wires to go so I drilled a 28mm hole for the biggest grommet I could find. Figured that'd be plenty wide but turned out to be quite tight after all. With a little lubricant the last RCA was pushed through eventually.

Four pairs of cables, one input that'll come from the headunit once I buy one. Two more for the fronts and rears and last one for the subs. Double shielded because my last install suffered from alternator whine because the cheapo RCA's literally picked up anything.


They barely fit through the grommet.. Also taped the loom I made for the +12V/Remote/Ground connections.



All done. Box is held in place with some outdoor-use velcro tape, should be good for a while Will run the cables to the trunk sometime soon.

very nice

Installed a rearview camera last night. Had quite some difficulty in carefully removing the rear cover because I didn't want to break any clips, but they were hard to see, so I had to take it slow.
There wasn't an open way to get to the license plate lights directly. They were hooked up to a connector that was fitted and sealed between the two chassis layers. I'm not really sure why this is so properly sealed off, I can't see how water would run here at all, but I suppose it's a good thing. Carefully planned a hole/grommet which I sealed off again with some moldable rubber. Getting the wires into the car then wasn't much of an issue with a nylon draw-in wire, although the RCA plug was a tad big to get through the rubbers.

The victim. I picked this over the other common model because the T5W bulb/holder combination clicks into the housing. No need to mess with wires there, and the color will be unchanged. The Dutch MOT equivalent requires there be no color variation among similar lights on either side.


Grommet, located closely to the connector for the license plate lights. Bit of a bad pic unfortunately.





Reference pic with clip locations

Fog lights fitted (and wrote typed up a guide for doing so https://www.vxoc.org.uk/forum/Thread-Ins...ofit-guide).


Also booked in for a remap 2nd week of July. Gonna make a trip to EDS in Germany as supposedly they're the real deal when it comes to these cars. Added a dyno run so I'm excited to see how that turns out.

Updating the headunit may take a little while since there's a lot of stuff I want to get working first, but we'll get there eventually. Need to get some other non-car related projects out of the way first before I can spend good time on that.
In the meantime I do want to upgrade the audio path gradually. Even with just a few hours every week I can apply dampening materials on the doors one at a time, and replace the speakers and add new wiring for them. So instead of a new android headunit I'll just fit a high-low converter for now, so that I can at least enjoy the speakers being powered by a proper amp. Pics to follow..

Despite a whole backlog of less interesting things to do I made some progress with the audio install this weekend.

I took out most of the stuff in the trunk and found that there was already a bit of dampening material applied. I filled up the largest untouched areas since there will eventually be a subwoofer in the trunk, so a bit of noise insulation won't hurt.
In the back end of the boot was a styrofoam block that seemed to only support the top carpeting. Figured that'd make a great spot for the amplifier. Said and done:


I also tried getting wiring to one of the doors, successfully. First I inserted the crimp pins I extracted from a donor connector of a scrap car in spares in the housing:


Soldered them together and reassembled. Pretty good


Next weekend will be routing the wire to the other doors, grabbing the tulp cables from the glove box where they've been tucked away for some months now.

I'd seen the mud flaps on a few other member's cars and quite liked them. Ordered Friday from the UK, and they arrived today.



Mini-tip: don't blindly take the wheels off. With minimal finicking I got them done without taking off the fronts.

Got a ECU remap! Visited EDS Motorsport in Marl, Germany for some stage-1 tuning.
I also opted for a dyno run because I was hoping to obtain the bragging rights associated with breaking 200hp, turns out the car was in good enough condition for that. End result 202hp/475Nm. Coming from 130/300 I have to say the difference is crazy. Feels like a whole new car, especially after 2000rpm. Am very content, and the service was excellent as well.

Finished wiring up the amplifier. Had to install a high-to-low converter until a proper headunit with tulp outputs is installed, gotta line up some funds for that first though.
I spliced the rear speaker outputs using terminals from a connector I obtained from the scrap yard, so I can always go back to 100% original. I also did some measuring and it turns out pin 43 is very suitable for use as a 'remote' wire. It gives a positive +12V when the radio is powered on, and after power-off it remains high for about another minute. So I spliced this wire too, and ran it to the amplifier in the back and the equalizer that has been sitting prepared for a few months now in the glovebox.




Next it was time to finally run the tulp wires from the glove box to the amp in the rear:



So that concludes the amplifier wiring. Hopefully tomorrow I can get a few doors done.

looking good mate.

Yes pin 43 is the factory remote wakeup wire.

Saw a post on fixing the annoying interior rattle by shoving a sponge above the interior light.
Clearly this rattle doesn't restrict itself to Astra's as it was quite present for me as well. The height between the roof and the light assembly was quite substatial, significantly more than a single sponge. So I folded up some thick noise absorbtion foam and stuck it in there.

Works very well, thus far.

Had some time tonight to start on the speakers upgrade. Got the rears done and one of the fronts. Applied bitumen mats for damping effect on the inner part of the door. If the door cards themselves still resonate I might add some Focal BAM to them, as they gave good results in my previous build.
Careful measuring revealed the crossovers would just fit when mounting next to the speaker, so that was easy.


One more door left for tomorrow

Made the loom for the DAB+ module and hooked it up.
Also requested the VCI code, so hopefully it'll be activated by tomorrow.
Gotta say, getting charged €95 for this 'category C retrofit' feels like like a massive scam. I suppose GM really hates their customers.

I've never been charged for DAB retrofit.
The whole thing is a con it's just there way of trying to stop retrofits I think.

You mean they actually gave you the VCI without asking that you pay first for it on infotech? That'd be welcome!
Update: that's exactly what they did. So I guess it's just discouragement after all.

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Wasn't busy at work so I quickly entered the VCI. All good!

cool, DAB is much better.

Felt the audio was really lacking highs in the rear seats. Not sure why they aren't part of any standard package on anything but entry-level cars but alas, we can remedy this. Felt a bit scary to wreck those otherwise perfectly good door cards but sometimes you just gotta take the plunge.







Felt the hole was damn near a proper circle and the cup fit very snug.

looking good make any difference?

Yeah, higs are much better for sure. But the woofer I used was always part of a composet. The placement of the cups isn't ideal, would've preferred the placement a bit higher up but the door cards don't accommodate that.

Been negligent in keeping this updated but here we go.

Main improvements:
* went balls deep on sound deadening
* wasn't happy with the sound yet and doubled down on the gear
* done some meticulous wiring for all the amps etc.

Here we go. Sound deadening; I applied CLD tiles on all large resonating surfaces and placed MLV backed by some foamy stuff throughout all of the interior. Took a really long weekend, looks kinda rad and surely improves the acoustics. But honestly, it probably isn't worth the hassle, cash, bloody fingers and weight increase (50kg).

Stripped the interior out:


Progress pic, cutting CCF and MLV to fit:


Seems I didn't make a 'completed' pic, must've been dark and tired by then..

Next day was the doors. Transfering the shape wasn't too bad but getting the panels to clip back on was quite hard. The added material really needs to align perfectly and cannot obstruct any part of the plastic or the clips just unpop by themselves.

So far so good:


Not so tight anymore, but the door cards stay on now..


Gotta say, slamming the doors has a really fulfilling sound to it now.


Wiring then; I'm not entirely sure what I did initially and when I started changing things. But the result is pretty sick in terms of specs if you ask me.
An improvement ofted called 'big 3 upgrade' on audio forums is to add thicker wiring between alternator, battery and chassis. This reduces resistance between these components and creates a more level ground, reducing dips in voltage when drawing more current. I.e. no dimming headlights when the bass drops, something like that. Now I don't personally play music at such volumes anyway, but I had all of the required thick (AWG0) the wire left anyway.

Extra wire from alternator to battery. Also replaced the negative pole clamp for one with accomodates AWG0 wire to the chassis.


Added a nice battery fuse + voltage level indicator. There's a switch so the display is off when the hood is closed. After the fuse comes a 1x4 distributor block splitting the AWG0 wire into 4x AWG6 which was easier to run to the trunk while still better (more squared area) than a single AWG0.


Since I'll be running the tweeters actively instead of using the passive crossovers I needed to wire thm up separately as well. The door connectors had enough free pins for this, so this to me is much nicer than butchering those expensive connectors by drilling holes into them.



Guess that leaves the trunk then. I thrashed the 10 year (10+, maybe?) old JBL amp and got some nice rockford fosgates 4-channels instead. They do 400W RMS each which is pretty crazy for amps with such small footprint. For the subwoofer I chose a nice Gladen which has excellent output even on 4 Ohm impedance.

Speaker of the subwoofer, I made an MDF box for it. Fits tightly in the spare-wheel well and doesn't cost me any boot space this way. The box is laid out specifically to match the subwoofer specific parameters. There's a whole bunch of math behind that which I didn't know of, so took quite a while to design on the computer.

Constructing it..


Tight fit!


On eBay I found a nice 10 Farad hybrid capacitor for a somewhat reasonable price. It was going to be a tight fit but it can also perfectly serve as a distribution point for the other components.

It's starting to come together now..


As I mentioned a little earlier, I wanted to actively drive the tweeters. Meaning I need to determine the crossover points before amplification. In other words, install a sound processor. I found this nice 8-input 10-output DM-810 by audiocontrol. Since I was really stretching the budget I held of the purchase for a while. When I found what seemed to be a great deal I purchased the device on amazon. Apparently the seller obtained it on auction from a store that went out of business. The unit however was only a demo model, there was no software on there. The seller instantly reassured me, told me this was very possible and immediately refunded the item. He also told me there would be no warranty on it so I needn't bother returning the item either.

Now I had some free and defective hardware. I saw no point in not opening it up, and seeing if there was any way to get software loaded on there. Since it was completely blank, running the regular firmware update process wasn't possible. The part of the firmware that allows the user to update the firmware itself wasn't there, but of course they have an alternative way to program them in the factory.
I went on to trace the PCB traces, identified the main chip and extracted the relevant binaries from the firmware update package. Figured out which parts of the firmware to upload where. Hooked it up to a DIY programmer I had build years before for a chip from a similar series and lo and behold, it actually took.


That was quite satisfying both from a technical as well as a financial standpoint

Anyway, I hooked it all up. This is the end result minus some slightly further tidying of the wiring in the top-right corner near the DSP.


The very last thing I did is make a custom cover incorporating a nice grill for the sub.



Next up will be replacing the horrible headunit with a pioneer.

Looking good mate.