I am trying to put the wires together but I'm not sure how to sucessfully accomplish this. I attached a pic with one of my main concerns. Basically is just matched them and ground 2 here and 1 in Connector 2, right?

1. I have a ground in my harness, should I use that one? Or should I ground each one individually or tap the one in the AVIC harness with the car harness and ground that longer cable.
2. The green (parking brake ground) should be grounded on it's own or can be tapped into so I can ground 3 things using 1 wire.

Any other suggestions (or help) would be highly appreciate . Thanks

You can connect all 3 wires to the ground wire in the vw harness there. As far as connections go, you have a couple options. Solder and tape, twist and tape, or butt connectors. If you go with either tape method make sure you use good quality electrical tape.

thank you! very interesting, and good call, it's for VW but actually for a benz (so I guess they are the same)

I have another question (sorry... at least I put pics... :) To create a ground cable my "connector 2" lack of a metallic connection at the end. I wish I could be more specific but it doesn't make a lot of sense to connect a ground to plastic. That really is the same as nothing... but honestly I really don't know and the best of all I have faith in you guys :D

What you have to do is remove one of the unused pins from the power harness for instance and insert it into that empty slot. By the way since you're putting this into a benz, you'll have to hook the yellow wire from the avic harness to the red wire in the vw harness and the red wire of the avic harness to the yellow wire of the vw harness. When you use the vw harness in benz's or beamers you have to swap those 2 wires otherwise youlose presets and stuff.

One other thing you might consider doing, to make it all look really nice and professional when you're done, is get yourself some heat shrink tubing and putting that on each wire after you've connected them. Heck, I dunno, maybe you're already on top of that! :)

Cheers!

cntrylvr79 said:

What you have to do is remove one of the unused pins from the power harness for instance and insert it into that empty slot. By the way since you're putting this into a benz, you'll have to hook the yellow wire from the avic harness to the red wire in the vw harness and the red wire of the avic harness to the yellow wire of the vw harness. When you use the vw harness in benz's or beamers you have to swap those 2 wires otherwise youlose presets and stuff.

I can't thank you enough

Nice save, cntrylvr! I'm impressed you remembered the wire switch....

By the way since you're putting this into a benz, you'll have to hook the yellow wire from the avic harness to the red wire in the vw harness and the red wire of the avic harness to the yellow wire of the vw harness. When you use the vw harness in benz's or beamers you have to swap those 2 wires otherwise youlose presets and stuff.

Does it matter that the yellow has the 10A fuse?

No it doesn't. That's the fuse for the z1. Like I said just make sure you flop the red and yellow wires and you'll be good.

Jimmy303 - Yeah, after troubleshooting many other installers and forget or did know that, it's permanantly engrained in what's left of my brain.

so, I wired up everything and the unit did not power up... :( ... I'm I doing something wrong? is there an on/off switch that I'm not aware of? This is sooooo sad :'(

What year is the benz?

2002

this is how I wired it and some pics inside... So, I finally got it to work. The yellow one and the red one are just decorative in the metra harness. I found out that the harness lacks of a hot wire (maybe is in the incorrect position), that sucked. I had to ran a wire from the cigarrette adapter to the harness, what a pain in the butt.

So I finally got everything together, now I have left to do the XM wiring... I am about to give up... (I think I can tap the newly created connection, right?) Oh boy, everything is a pain... not that simple, not that simple... Does anyone knows what wires do I need to hookup the XM? thanks

That thick red?white wire back there should read as a constant unless there"s a blown fuse somethwere in the car. But I guess that doesn't matter anymore since you ran a new one. Such is life any pics of the z1 actually in the car?

cough. cough... maybe there was also a blown fuse... hehehehe, I did change it but no love so I had to do it straight. Can I tap the newley connection to get power for my XM from there? Is it possible or do I have to take the long way from the battery (man that's a long wire)

No, you can tap power for the xm right behind the radio as well.

Thank you!

I made a how-to, located in the MBWORLD.org forums
http://www.mbworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=163395

Thanks

That looks SWEET! Thanks for the pics and the props on the MB site. Something you might want to add, if they get a pre July 06 unit, the byass is different.

Remember, if you are using a GEX-P10XMT but you are only subscribing to standard XM, not the NavTraffic package, do NOT hook up the data cable (the smaller multi-conductor cable), or else you will end up with an 'XM updating' message.