Murch

Disclaimer: This is all just my personal experience. Things in here might not always be ideal, but they worked for me!

Preparation:
The first thing I do is pull my ground off my battery and clamp the cable off away from the terminal. Short circuits are nasty, and will kill any gear that's hooked up many times.

Next, Just lay out all your wiring, make sure you have everything, and make plans for how you want to run the power/audio/remote cables through the car.

For a basic setup, there's no need to buy one of those wiring kits. Buy a larger guage wire (red) that will reach the entire length of your car, an equal, or larger guage SHORT (2 ft tops) wire (black), a fine guage wire (blue.. this is for the remote) that will also reach the length of your car from your local home improvement store. Finally, grab 4 crimpable eyelets (that makes for extras just in case) big enough to fit over fairly large bolts.... see my pictures later for an idea of the size.

Next, head over to the car audio place of your choice and buy 1 long stereo rca cable, and a car audio fuse.

You should also get around 3 feet of speaker wire from either place.

Buying all of this instead of buying a kit will save you a significant amount of money, as the total cost should probably be under 10-20 dollars.

Next, get all of your nececcary tools and supplies. I reccomend having a drill, crimping tool, crimps, screwdrivers, and a coat hanger.


Fishing the power wire:
This is the most time consuming part of the installation, or at least is for me. First of all clamp the wire (long, red) into the fuse, with a short piece on each side. You can then screw this onto the batteries + terminal, although be sure there's no fuse in the fuse holder if you do this now {fig 1}.

I've found the best way to get this wire inside the cockpit is to put it through the fender. See {fig 2} for a picture of where. All I do is feed it through as far as I can, then hook it with a coat hanger i've straigtend with a hook on the end from the inside of the door panel {see fig 3 for location}.

Poke a hole in the rubber door grommit there {fig 3 again}, and push the wire through it. Congradulations, you've avoided drilling any holes!

Next, pull off the piece of trim right under the door grommit. It's easy to do, really, you just need to pull on it a bit and it pops right off. these pieces have little snap buttons on them you'll need to pop in after so watch where it goes when it pops out {fig 4}.

Give the kick plate a little tug and it should come right off too. {fig 5}.

Just drop the wire through where all the other wiring goes through in these pieces and snap them back on.

Now, you should have the wire fished to the back of the drivers side seat. I stuff the wire up into the seatbelt pillar just for the sake of not seeing it. just push it up under the plastic above where the bottom mount for the seatbelt is.

At this point, you should pull out your back seats, (just lift the front of them, they pop right out) and the rear kick plates (same as the front kick plates, just lift). Feed the wire through the rear kick plate wire channel, and into the trunk under the rear seat's back. {fig 6}

That's the hard part out of the way. All you need to do now is the RCA's, Remote (Blue wire), and Ground (black wire). I reccomend doing the ground next. There's a great spot for attatching this right under the carpet hanging off the back of the rear seats. {fig 7}

That one should take seconds to do. Move on to the rca's/remote. These you can run together, just pull out your deck, feed them to it from the passenger side, and then follow the same instructions as the power wire to put these to the trunk, this time moving along the passenger side kick plates, etc.

Congrats, Wiring is complete!


Mounting/Wiring the Amp:
Compared to what you just did this is the easy part. Mark spots on your back seat where the screw mounts on your amp are. look at the screws that came with it, and drill smaller holes in the back of the seat at your marks. Screw in. Nice and easy!

As far as getting the wiring to the amp, I like a cleaner install. There's a black mesh fabric under the grey carpeting attatched to the seat. I put ALL of my wires up through a small slit i make in it, put them out through a small slit beside the terminals on my amp, and then attatch them to their appropriate terminals. Done!

All that's left to do is hook it up to the sub. I'll leave out the details of putting a speaker in a box. Once your sub is ready to go in the trunk, just take that speaker wire, attatch it to the amp, drop it through your new wiring channel in the back seat, and run it up and out of the seam in the back of the trunk carpet {fig 8}. Attatch to appropriate terminals on the sub box.


You're pretty much done, just go connect the fuse in the power wire, and put the negative line back on to the battery terminal.

FINISHED!

Test, and enjoi!

See fig1-8 below.

JonPug

theres no picture

EDIT: nevermind.. i just realized you only posted this 5 minutes ago... you are prolly loading the pic now.

Murch

Figure 1

Murch

Figure 2

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Figure 3

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Figure 4

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Figure 5

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Figure 6

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Figure 7

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Figure 8

Murch

Any other tips anyone has, feel free to add. Like I said, this is my personal experience!

Murch

Yep... I was just posting them

purecoda

iTrader: (6)

1. Great thread, sure to be stickied.
2. You might want to edit a few of the photo's with arrows, so that the wiring can be more easily seen.
3. Any pics of the amp and sub install complete? We wanna see the junk in your trunk!



Overall.

Murch

1. Thanks!
2. I'll see about doing that later on... I have to go do fathers day stuff in a few... - Edit: Dad can wait. Added some comments to a few of the pictures

3. Sure... It's a pretty basic setup.... 12" dual voice coil rockford running on a rockford 301m. I just wanted really powerful, deep bass, not to shake my car apart

I've got it bridged to 2ohm's, and I get 300watts rms out of the amp.





It's a totally stealth install.. the only wire you ever see is the speaker wire (which unfortunately with all the moving stuff around i did to take the pictures from this post, has pulled my carpet into the picture in that second pic

Iamkar33m

iTrader: (26)

Stickied