2004 Sequoia 6-Disc Cd Changer

[rpiengr]

Hi all; I'm new to this. I have a 2004 Sequoia in which the CD player stopped working as I was loading CD's more than a year ago. I called the local dealer, and he said to go to car audio dealer to get it fixed. I feared I wouldn't have the right tools to get the radio out of the dash to even look at it, so I just did without the CD function for more than a year. Today, I went to the local car audio dealer and learned they'd charge $60 to pull and reinstall the radio, send it to one of two authorized repair shops (east coast, west coast), expect $200-400 repair costs and take about two weeks.

That motivated me to come home, get out the tools and start prying on the plastic facing around the radio. The bottom came out easily, and I figured out there was a screw in each of the air vents. After removing the screws, the plastic with the two vents and all the controls in that portion of the dash slipped out easily and hung there supported by the wiring harness still attached. That exposed the frame holding the radio. Removing 4 screws, 2 on either side of the radio, #10 metric nuts, allowed me to slide the radio easily and unplug the wires in the back. There were 3 multi-wire sockets that required depressing the connector's with a screw driver to allow them to then easily unplug. I carefully pried each tab of the plastic face, working my way around with a small screw driver while gently tugging outward. With the plastic face off, I removed two small screws to take the top plate off. That exposed the innards of the CD player, and I could see the offending CD, 2nd one down from the top, had not seated in the center of the player. I nudged it with my small screw driver, and it popped into place. Reassembled everything and the player worked. When I tried to play the offending CD, it hung up again, but eject worked this time! I then saw that it was a home-burned CD with paper label on it. The label had started to peel at one spot, and exposed adhesive was aggravating matters.

All this in was done in not much more time than it's taken me to find this forum and type up what I did -- about an hour.

Hope this gives others the confidence to take this on themselves. Beats $260 - $460 repair cost!!!

[man-bing]

Welcome to the forum

Well done for taking out your H/U too, sometimes not easy but well worth it.

What you could of done, or maybe for next time, is get some pics and show us, so that way, if anybody else got the same sort of car like yours will be handy to see what to do.

Bing

[Nina]

Very good job rpiengr!! I don't have such expirience to repair audio device. I think about buying new Sequoia for 7-8 months. Maybe something like this: Premium.

[Bulldog55]

Very good information of removing radio from vehicle.  Removing the face plate of the changer to get to the cd's have me confused.  I couldn't figure out how to do that today.