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This is a really simple mod that will increase your car's handling, improve weight balance and give you a lot more room under the hood (making work a lot easier). Front wheel drives might not want to do this since it shifts traction to the rear wheels, which is good for AWD cars, but bad for you front wheelers. To start out, you're going to need 3 things: A completely sealed acid-free battery (eg. Westco Battery), 12 feet of 4 or larger gauge wire (+ connectors) and a circuit breaker (or fuse box). | ||||||||||||||
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Now
to begin, you need to remove the battery, battery tray and metal
mounting bracket. Once that's out of the way go ahead and remove the
passenger seat, the rear seat cushion, the passenger side rear plastic
cover, the seatbelt hook (canadian model thing?), the plastic mud guard
on the door sill and then finally, the carpet. Once this is removed,
you'll have a nice view of the car's flooring. You have to determine
now how you're going to route the wiring into the engine compartment. I
had a hole in the firewall just under the glove box which worked
perfectly. If you for some reason don't have this, there is a large
hole higher up that you could squeeze the wire through. If you use the
lower hole, the wire will come out into the inside of your car's frame.
To get it into the engine bay, pull the rubber cover out of the hole
just below where the metal battery mount used to attach and you should
see your wire. Use tweezers or some other tiny grabbing tool to pull
the wire up and through this hole. To be safe, cut the middle out of
the rubber cover, slide it around the cable and reattach it into the
hole. This will protect the wire from being cut by the sharp hole edge.
Now that the wire is secured, strip the end and solder a flat round
connector onto the end. Now take the 3 stock wires which normally
attach to the + battery terminal, put them all on top of eachother
along with the new wire's connector and stick a bolt through the
middle. Tighten it up with the correct size nut. Make sure you cover
the new connection with something to keep it from grounding out to a
metal piece in the engine bay, or you'll blow the circuit breaker very
often.
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To safely route this new wire, the perfect solution is to use the car's stock wire holders. You should see a bunch of white upsidedown T shaped holders with a thick wire loom running along it. Remove the electrical tape that is holding that loom to the white connectors. Run your new battery cable in parallel with this wire loom and retape. Run the wire up underneath where the rear seat cushion would go and inbehind the stock plastic hatch cover. | ||||||||||||||
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At this point you have to mount a circuit breaker or fuse block somewhere near the battery. I chose to cut a rectangular hole out of the plastic and bolt up my Rockford Fosgate 140A circuit breaker in there. It turned out looking very clean and it will be right next to the battery. The reason you need this is if your positive cable shorts out to the body somewhere, it could set your car on fire. That's why this circuit breaker near the battery is VERY important. DO NOT skip this step. Connect a short wire from the + terminal of your battery to the "BATT" connector on the circuit breaker, and the line coming from the front to the "ACC" connector. Now you will need a negative cable which will run to a good body ground. A very easy place to connect your negative cable to is a bolt just inside the jack cover panel. It's easily found as it's the only black bolt in that whole area (around where the side marker is). Clean off any paint or dirt with a wire brush, solder another flat ring connector onto your short negative cable and attach. Ta da! Done with the wiring. | ||||||||||||||
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Now here's where you get to finally mount your new battery. The best place for it is in that back passenger side corner where the tool kit usually sits. Pull out the two rubber-band-holding teeth with vice grips and you have a nice flat surface to mount you battery on. Since the driver's front corner is the heaviest corner in this car, setting the battery in the back passenger corner will have the most benefit as it helps even out the weight distrobution. To mount the battery, it's up to you. Just about anything will work. Just make sure that it's very strong and secure and won't send the battery flying in an accident. A 20 pound block hitting you in the back of the head at 60mph is not something you want to happen. That's it! Once it's bolted down, go for a test drive, take some nice fast corners and see how much better your car feels now! | ||||||||||||||
For
more tips on how to modify your DSM and increase performance, please
select from the following links:
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