Creating this thread in order to chronicle the proverbial voyage of progression of ownership of my two Crown Victorias. First, I suppose I should being with a little history.

I had wanted a CVPI for years. Decided to get serious about it when work decide to move the office and I was faced with an even more grueling commute than I currently have. I wanted something rugged, tough, reliable and most importantly something that the manufacturer made a zillion of so that parts would be available in plentiful supply for some time to come. What better than a CVPI? So I searched, researched, then researched some more. After over a year I finally decided that I'd go with a 2010 CVPI. It was a former Texas Highway Patrol car (which was the direction I decided to go, ergo to avoid "city cruisers") and had relatively low mileage at the time of purchase (~94K). I bought it from an older guy who has purchased these cars for years and makes auction buying his retirement business. I did a few quick mods to it in order to attempt to make it appear as non-CVPI as possible (if that is possible). I added window liners, painted it all-black and bought new wheels. The last item had an issue that at the time I simply wasn't aware of. Now that I am in-the-know (thanks to CV.net) it kinda irks me, but I'm working on a resolution. I also upgraded the shocks and created a thread in the technical forums regarding that work. Anyway, this CVPI is my daily driver to this day.

Not too long thereafter I purchased a second CVPI from the same retired gentleman. It was also a 2010 model. I did so with the intent of sprucing it up for my wife to use as her driver. However, even after a year of carefully nudging her about it, she never agreed to drive it. For whatever reason she just didn't want to drive a former police anything. Dunno why. So in the end I sold that CVPI, kept mine but bought her a 2006 Crown Victoria LX Sport. I did that with the basic thought that the leather combined with the console shifter might be more appealing to her. As it would turn out, I was correct. She liked that better and she liked that it was white, not black. I detailed this saga in another thread in the lounge. Essentially, I am picking up the overall story from that point with this thread.

I've tried to add pictures but don't see an option in the "Post Options" section of the webpage to do that. I'll try again later.

Thanks!
Jerry

Ok for whatever reason I never was able to determine why I can't post pictures to this thread; nor was the moderator who took a look at it either. So I decided to go the external picture hosting route. Went with imgur as others on the forum suggested/do themselves. 'Never done the picture-hosting thing before; 'will be interesting to see how it goes...

Anyway.

So to pick the story back up from the exchanging vehicles thread in the other forum...the console shifter in the 2006 LX Sport that I bought for my wife wouldn't illuminate. A burned out bulb was my hope, but usually hasn't been my luck with similar events in the past (other vehicles - to be clear).

I snapped a few pictures as I went along. Getting things undone:


Yeah I'd say that's a burned out bulb:


These are the correctly-sized replacements that I went with, part number shown as an FYI:


And now it works. Boy but was that too simple!

To continue the story, as you can see in this photo that was taken prior to my purchase of this CV, someone installed some type of phone-charging system:


They also broke one of the vent vanes in the process:


So I went to a local salvage yard and pulled one from a 2006 LX:


Cleaned it up a bit and installed it no problem. Then removed the center entertainment pod:


But in so doing, I discovered that the previous owners had put A LOT OF CRAP within the voids of the center of the dash!





It's enough to make me wonder what in the HELL all of this stuff is. Granted, the previous owners also installed a light-flashing system:


I haven't had time since I pulled all of this crap out to trace the system cabling to see if it is indeed a part of all of this stuff, but that's next on the list. In the meantime, I thought I'd post the pictures to the forum to see if anyone out there might recognize any of this mess.

Thanks,
Jerry

Ok so I forced myself to make time to figure this thing out tonight. I need to get the LX back on the road but don't want to do that prior to understanding what all this crap is. Short version: it has nothing to do with the flashing lights, which I kinda suspected. Nope, one of the previous owners installed a Sirius satellite radio system.

Not being familiar with Sirius whatsoever, and therefore having virtually no clue as to what this stuff was, my first step was to take a look to see what was behind my daily driver CVPI's radio for comparison...as I had guessed, niente:


So this do-dadd is the first of what ended up being 3 components to the system. It's the Sirius car power adapter, a $9 part at Walmart:


And their installation technique was to just splice into the radio's power and ground (gheez but I am not a fan of that horse-hockey):


Component 2 appeared to be a radio signal splitter; my presumption is that this is done so that your Sirius device can receive input from the conventional radio in addition to the satellite business:


The final component was a bit of a mystery until I pulled myself out of gory-detail-mode and realized that there had to be an antenna somewhere. Sure enough, that is what this is:


They ran it though the back of the double-den, down under the driver's side of the dash, up through the weatherstripping and over to the front center of the car where it was just hanging out on the roof via magnet. I had noticed that in the past but wasn't certain if it was a part of the LX's security system or some such nonsense. Turns out not so much. Just a satellite antenna:



Anyway mystery solved.

So I ripped all of that BS out and will make more time tomorrow to button everything back up. I'll take it in to get new tires all 'round on Thursday (hopefully the TPMS won't be affected) and then the wife-eee can have at it.

FWIW. Hope it helps.

Thanks,
Jerry

Awesome job Jerry!!

Good detective work.



I want to knock the previous owner around for that sloppy install. 4/10 on the effort.

Thank you! My wife has no interest in the Sirius stuff, so removing was an obvious decision. I plan to research things a bit and then put in a system that suits her.

Well here she is after new tires were installed all 'round, along with the first installment on a lifetime alignment deal, then buttoned back up for the wife:




That was around $1200, so the other stuff I had/have planned will need to wait until next month. Funny, but they had a handful of suggestions for repairs, all of which I had noticed and put on the agenda to do myself. I didn't mention that to the shop of course, just nodded and said "ok, maybe later."

Thanks,
Jerry

Although the majority of the stuff I want to do to the wife's LX Sport will have to wait until next month, I decided to proceed with the installation of the window deflectors/liners/whatever-they're-called. Did that tonight:


Funny but prior to getting into ownership of my CVPI I had never owned a car (or truck) that had these deflectors/liners/whatever installed. My CVPI was the first for me. Somehow I didn't think I'd like them, but the opposite was the case, as it turns out. Dunno why really, but they were a must-have for the wifeeee and her LX. She likes them too, though she's from Europe and whenever I traveled there I seemed to recall noticing these critters installed on more vehicles than I would see in the USA. For all of the non-scientific, non-stats value such a series of foggy recollections are worth.

Anyway thanks,
Jerry

Ive never seen a white lx sport. Also, you have a chrome grille. Is it possible that the center console was added from previous owner? Does the vin say P74?

Other then that, car is looking very nice

ford05: Yup, it's a genuine LX Sport. Says so on the Carfax report, title and even the window sticker:


I'd like to lay-hands on another set of 2003+ LX Sport wheels. Not knowing any better - and the lady at a local wheel shop telling me that "there was only one type for the Crown Vics" (which isn't true, there were two) - I put a set of the 2001-2002 on my CVPI and would like to swap them out, then sell the 01-02s on...someday perhaps...

Anyway thanks,
Jerry

Well so someone did this to my pax mirror on the CVPI in some parking lot that I don't even remember:




These pictures were taken after I had pulled what was left of it up (it was dangling) and re-installed it into place. I actually had to drive it around like that for several days because there was no time to work on it; the biggest time sink of all of the sub-elements in that task being the simple hunt for the replacement mirror in the ever-growing stash of CVPI parts that I have been accumulating. Dontchaknow that remembering where you put something is always the tallest pole in the tent.

The repair itself is old hat and nothing to write home about, so discontinue reading now unless you are sitting down for a long session of Internet surfing/forum reading and have a few minutes...

So this is the replacement that I picked up in a salvage yard about a year ago IIRC:



Standard fare. Or so I thought. More below.

Removing the door panel is of course straightforward, though doing so is always more of a fiddly task than I'd prefer. Anyway once off I noticed two things:
1) The weatherliner needs replacing (if I can be bothered to do that)
2) This particular CVPI doesn't have the steel-plated inner door panels - which I didn't think it did, but was half-curious to actually find out.

The weatherliner:



And you gotta love these three critters! Ford just HAD to implement this design that forces you to be careful when removing them else run the risk of dropping the nuts into the voids of the door where they become difficult-to-impractical to retrieve. My F-350 has the same arrangement. Sigh.


Anyway, job done:


And all was well. Now for the not-so-much thing...

I could be remembering incorrectly, but I seem to recall that when adjusting the mirror with the knob control on the driver's side door, if you deflected it left, the pax mirror turned to your left, ergo inward towards the door. And the opposite was/is true IIRC. Well that isn't the case with this puppy. You have to push the knob to the RIGHT and the mirror will then move LEFT, or inward towards the door. Same LEFT-RIGHT movement scenario for the opposite direction applies here. So I dunno. That had me scratching my head. Up and down correspond intuitively, so what gives? I immediately thought that I had connected it improperly but those connectors are form-fitting, so there's really only one way that they can be snapped together. Eh whichever. I plan on checking out the LX Sport tonight when I get home to see what it does...I could be off-base on this one, we'll see.

Speaking of the LX Sport, I had a text message on the display a while back stating something to the effect that it was time to change my oil soon. Wha-? I had just changed it when I bought the car. Then the message changed to a you-gotta-do-it-now type of tone. That was interesting. I hadn't seen a car do that, so my curiosity was piqued. Turns out that this particular UI system has an oil-change reset procedure, much like your trip odometer does. So I simply navigated through the menu and reset it. Now I don't see the message. I couldn't find any information regarding the mileage however. Ergo when will I see that message again? In 3,000 miles? 5,000 miles? Is that mileage reminder adjustable? Dunno, haven't investigated that yet. 'Will be interested to learn though...

Also with the LX Sport...the wife is driving more often now, so I think I'm gonna need to step up those minor repairs a bit earlier than I had planned. Nothing major, just new rotors, new pads, fluid changing, etc. I'll post when I do that.

Ok thanks,
Jerry

Well I tested the LX Sport the other day WRT the mirror thing. Sure enough it behaves as you would expect it to: left moves the mirror left, etc. So I dunno why this particular mirror on the CVPI is behaving that way but it re-teaches me the lesson of not buttoning everything up until you've fully tested, if possible. I just never thought that the mirror would run in reverse, so I didn't bother to verify it first. Sigh.

Sounds like the two wires for the left/right motor are reversed for some reason. If you pull it back out you should be able to pop the little red retainer out and repin the connector. If you still have the broken one the wire colours should be the same.

As far as the oil change monitor you should be able to get a percentage of life left (according to the car). I think you have to go through the system check to get to it.

Mine was around 4,000 miles or so, if I remember correctly.

Yeah that's the thought I had. Other than some type of goof though, I was scratching my head as to why/how those wires might be reversed. But anyhoo, if I can get myself motivated enough to actually want to dig into the door again, I'll play around with it to see what I can turn up. I did save all of the reusable parts from the old mirror, yes:


Sheesh but that borderlines on hoarder territory.



Had some time while the wife was inside shopping tonight, so I played around with this. Under the system check I was able to get a percentage but couldn't find a remaining-mileage value, at least not that I can remember. The percent was 88% and that number references the amount of time/life remaining before the next oil change is due. 'Gotta admit that when I first read your post I thought that this number was the computer telling me what percentage of life the car/engine as a *whole* had remaining. If that had been the case, I would have been impressed to no end (depending on accuracy naturally)! Alas, no. Still the engine oil change number is a cool thing to see regardless.

A thought just occurred that making a video regarding the pax mirror might be enough to get me interested in fiddling with it again...we'll see. I'll keep y'all posted.

Thank you for the feedback bluejay,
Jerry