Agent_51
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- February 12, 2002
- Messages
- 177
- Reaction score
- 0
- City, State
- San Diego, CA
- Year, Model & Trim Level
- 2000 Explorer XLT SOHC
Well I finished my first ever car audio install today. It only took 12 hours
.
Anyways I already have an MTX6500D (500wrms x 1 @ 2ohms) pushing two 12s and a Pioneer mp3 head unit. I had all this installed by circuit city last summer. I have the box for the subs behind the rear seats, and the amp is mounted to the back of the box. I always thought they did a pretty good because the only part I ever saw was nice and clean. Well I started getting adventurous and looking around when I had the back seats down. I pulled up the panels that are on the back of the seats and I saw a bunch of extra wire coiled up everywhere, both power wire, speaker wire and RCA cables. Now I don’t know anything about car audio but I know that this can cause interference in the wires by running the power wires next to the RCA's and speaker wires. I didn’t think much of it just kind of wished I knew I how to do it myself so I could have done it right.
Well I was still running my stock speakers, and I began to notice they couldn’t keep up with the subs at higher volumes. They were damn good speakers for stock though. So I looked around and went and listened to some stuff at circuit city again just to get an idea of what sounded good. I made a decision that I liked the infinity perfect 6.1s. I went home and checked on eBay and I could get them for almost half of what circuit city wanted for them. I jumped on that and because I already have one MTX amp, I decided to get another one to match it. I ended up getting a MTX 8302 (75wrms x 2 @ 4 ohms), which I got almost half off on two. All of it was factory sealed brand new, never used. Gotta love eBay. While I was waiting for it to get here I went out and looked at my existing power wire to my sub amp. I found out it was 8 gauge wire. So a week later all my new gear has been shipped to my door. I opened up the amp just to drool over it and I was surprised to find that MTX recommended 4 gauge for this amp. This confused me because my sub amp pushes 500 watts but this new smaller amp only pushes 300, so why does it need a wire twice the size? I almost ran an 8 gauge to it but I figured that MTX put that size recommendation there for a reason I decided to go with 4 gauge. I figured I would need a distribution block to run my two power wires now. Well I found out that you can only run certain configurations of wire into and out of the blocks. Such as a 4 gauge input then two 8 gauge outputs or on 0 gauge input and two 4 gauge outputs. Well seeing as I'm a cheap ass and didn’t want to spend a butload of money on 0 gauge to run to the distribution block then 4 gauge to run to the amps and for ground wires, I decided just to run two hot wires off the battery, one 4 gauge to the smaller amp and one 8 gauge to the sub amp. I went out to fry’s electronics and bought a 4 gauge wiring kit for the amp and some RCA's. I also picked up 30 feet of 16 gauge speaker wire and like 30 speaker lead terminals. Things kept coming up on weekends and it was a month before I got around to installing them today.
I started at about 2 pm. My first task was to pull the head unit. I had no clue how to do this. I grabbed a good ole flathead screwdriver and started prying here and there and it took me about 2 seconds to realize this was definitely not the right tool. So I took a step in the right direction and checked the manual. I’m the kind of person that keeps the manuals for just about everything I own, down to my toaster. So I read the book and realized I needed a special tool to pull the unit out. I called my local audio express and bought the tool for 3 bucks. I get home and pull the head unit.
I decided that I wanted to re run the RCA cables that circuit city had so nicely ran right along side my power cables. So I unplugged that from the deck, ripped up all the carpet trim along the drivers side and then all the trim on the passenger side, I left it all out because I figured I would be needing to run more wires later in the day. Well I ran the RCA's along the passenger side and after about 5 minutes managed to route it back up to the head unit and plugged it back in. I fired up the radio again just to see if it worked after my modifications. It did, I thought to myself, man this crap is easy! Ha-ha, yeah right little did I know I would be out there for about 10 more hours
Well I figured my next task would be to run my 4 gauge down through the grommet in the firewall then along the driver’s side and to the amp which I was mounting under passenger side seat in the back. I choose this location because it was kind of stealth and I would still be able to fold the seats down which was a huge plus. Ouch, burned my arm in the engine compartment, better find something else to do.
So ran my ground wire. I found a nice bolt under the carpet and tested the ground with my DMM, worked great. So I bolted my ground wire down and ran it down to the amp.
My arm was still a little tender so I decided to give the engine a while longer to cool down, so I ran the new RCA's for the smaller amp up to my head unit. After this I was wondering how I was going to connect my remote wire to this amp. I figured it would be ok if I just spliced my new remote wire into the existing one. So I did that. I check the engine and things were cooler so I ran my hot wire through the grommet. I was cursing do that one, whoo boy. You have to be contortionist to get that thing in there man.
Well I was looking at the terminals on the amp and I realized all I had left was the speakers now. Since I had never taken a door panel off I had to bust out the Chilton’s manual. I popped the two screws out over the door handle and noticed the panel still stuck like crazy to the door. The Chilton’s said to stick a screwdriver in between the door and panel and pry it. I was scared of breaking something because I have never taken a door panel off before. After a while I just said screw it and pulled real hard. POP. Ah ****, I thought, that definitely sounded like plastic breaking. I looked under that little corner I had lifted up and saw a while peg. COOL! It’s supposed to work like that. After about 5 minutes I had the whole door panel off and the power window/lock switch was hanging in the air. I unbolted the stock speaker and its spacer. My first obstacle was how in the hell was I going to mount this round woofer in this hole which was for a 5x7. I figured they must have some kind of bracket to mount this speaker in this hole, somebody has to. I called around every car audio place in the greater phoenix area without results until I gave up and as a last resort called circuit city. I called one about 5 minutes from my house and they said they had such a thing but they didn’t have any in stock. So I called one about 20 minutes away from my house. The guy said they had them, score. So I reconnect the negative cable to the battery, hop in the car and go to circuit city. About halfway there I'm wondering my stereo sounds like crap. Oops, forgot to reconnect the right stock speaker. Oh well, I get to circuit and bring the new woofer in with me. When I showed the guy the speaker he was really impressed with it. Then I tell him I was the guy on the phone who was looking for the mounting adapter. The guy looks at me like "What?" I tell him what I need and he explains to me that there is no such thing, and that the speaker would require custom fabrication to install. Horseshit, so I drove 20 miles each way thanks to whatever stupidass I talked to on the phone. Lovely.
I stuck the stock spacer back in the whole and put the woofer in the hole. The plastic looked pretty weak and I figured if I screwed anything into it that it would crack but I decided to give it ago anyways. I drilled a small pilot hole in the bracket and zapped a screw right through it. I did the same thing on the opposite side and actually had a tight fit. Then I bolted the spacer back into the stock location and it all fit nice and snug. That was one thing out of the way but now I needed to decide where to mount the crossover. After looking at it for about 5 minutes and sticking the thing everywhere I could imagine I decided the best place for it would be horizontally mounted above the speaker. I looked at the door material and it seemed pretty thick but I thought I would be able to make it though. WRONG. I spent about 15 minutes trying to get a screw through that crap. It was dark by this time and the only light I was working by was the one on my carport, which wasn’t nearly enough. I decided to make a home depot run. I came back a half hour later with sheet metal screws and a million candle power spot light which plugs into the cigarette lighter. With the spotlight making it seem like daylight, I started working away with the sheet metal screws and even with those it took like 5 minutes per hole, even with me leaning on the drill as hard as I could. Well I had the crossover mounted to do the door finally. I put the door panel back on and oh ****, the crossover is about an eighth of an inch too far towards the door jamb. Well I had to take the box off and spend another 10 minutes attaching it an eighth to the right. Put the door panel back on and bam, just like stock. Sweet. Now all I had to do was mount the tweeter, the strip and crimp like 40 terminals onto the speaker wire I need to wire the speakers together.
I couldn’t find a good place to flush mount the tweeters because I didn’t have enough room in any of the few places I wanted to mount them. So I ended up surface mounting them right below the power mirror switch. I drilled a hole through it for some wire and the zapped a few screws though to hold it down. I think it turned out good. After about another hour I had the other side of the truck all wired up and I was ready to turn the on the sound. I reconnected the negative on the battery, said a prayer (I’m not religious man by any means) and turned it on. Nothing, no sound at all. Ahhh crap. Then I remembered that I had turned the gain all the way down on the amp so I didn’t blow the speakers when I first turned it on. So I ran around to the back and turned the gains up till I could hear something. Cool both speakers are working. I wanted to stretch the systems legs a little bit so I decided to go for a drive. I’m driving and it sounds to me like the right speakers aren’t working, which is weird because I know they were when I left the parking lot. I had only driven about a mile so I turned around. The Chilton’s manual had called for the windows to be down when the door panel was taken off so I had both windows down. It was about 1 in the morning it was a bit cold outside. I rolled up the passenger side window from the switch in my door then I rolled up the drivers. Or I attempted to. Halfway up the window was stuck. Crap. So now I had to fix the right side not working and the left side window not going up which meant I had to tear off both door panels again. I got it home and decided I would do the right side first. That side was easy; in my haste to get everything together and working I forgot to tighten down a screw on the terminal of the crossover. Cool. Then I tore off the door panel for the driver’s side. DOH. I had accident ran the wire for the woofer through the track of the window and when the window was going up it was getting caught on the cable. I put both door panels back on and went for another drive. Glad I didn’t get pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving because I had 90% of my attention adjusting my settings on the head unit. I pulled into jack in the box drive thru to get a shake and it was 2:14am, 12 hours after I had started.
Phew that was a lot of writing and no one probably read it, but oh well. Maybe someone who is contemplating installing component speakers in their X will learn something.
.Anyways I already have an MTX6500D (500wrms x 1 @ 2ohms) pushing two 12s and a Pioneer mp3 head unit. I had all this installed by circuit city last summer. I have the box for the subs behind the rear seats, and the amp is mounted to the back of the box. I always thought they did a pretty good because the only part I ever saw was nice and clean. Well I started getting adventurous and looking around when I had the back seats down. I pulled up the panels that are on the back of the seats and I saw a bunch of extra wire coiled up everywhere, both power wire, speaker wire and RCA cables. Now I don’t know anything about car audio but I know that this can cause interference in the wires by running the power wires next to the RCA's and speaker wires. I didn’t think much of it just kind of wished I knew I how to do it myself so I could have done it right.
Well I was still running my stock speakers, and I began to notice they couldn’t keep up with the subs at higher volumes. They were damn good speakers for stock though. So I looked around and went and listened to some stuff at circuit city again just to get an idea of what sounded good. I made a decision that I liked the infinity perfect 6.1s. I went home and checked on eBay and I could get them for almost half of what circuit city wanted for them. I jumped on that and because I already have one MTX amp, I decided to get another one to match it. I ended up getting a MTX 8302 (75wrms x 2 @ 4 ohms), which I got almost half off on two. All of it was factory sealed brand new, never used. Gotta love eBay. While I was waiting for it to get here I went out and looked at my existing power wire to my sub amp. I found out it was 8 gauge wire. So a week later all my new gear has been shipped to my door. I opened up the amp just to drool over it and I was surprised to find that MTX recommended 4 gauge for this amp. This confused me because my sub amp pushes 500 watts but this new smaller amp only pushes 300, so why does it need a wire twice the size? I almost ran an 8 gauge to it but I figured that MTX put that size recommendation there for a reason I decided to go with 4 gauge. I figured I would need a distribution block to run my two power wires now. Well I found out that you can only run certain configurations of wire into and out of the blocks. Such as a 4 gauge input then two 8 gauge outputs or on 0 gauge input and two 4 gauge outputs. Well seeing as I'm a cheap ass and didn’t want to spend a butload of money on 0 gauge to run to the distribution block then 4 gauge to run to the amps and for ground wires, I decided just to run two hot wires off the battery, one 4 gauge to the smaller amp and one 8 gauge to the sub amp. I went out to fry’s electronics and bought a 4 gauge wiring kit for the amp and some RCA's. I also picked up 30 feet of 16 gauge speaker wire and like 30 speaker lead terminals. Things kept coming up on weekends and it was a month before I got around to installing them today.
I started at about 2 pm. My first task was to pull the head unit. I had no clue how to do this. I grabbed a good ole flathead screwdriver and started prying here and there and it took me about 2 seconds to realize this was definitely not the right tool. So I took a step in the right direction and checked the manual. I’m the kind of person that keeps the manuals for just about everything I own, down to my toaster. So I read the book and realized I needed a special tool to pull the unit out. I called my local audio express and bought the tool for 3 bucks. I get home and pull the head unit.
I decided that I wanted to re run the RCA cables that circuit city had so nicely ran right along side my power cables. So I unplugged that from the deck, ripped up all the carpet trim along the drivers side and then all the trim on the passenger side, I left it all out because I figured I would be needing to run more wires later in the day. Well I ran the RCA's along the passenger side and after about 5 minutes managed to route it back up to the head unit and plugged it back in. I fired up the radio again just to see if it worked after my modifications. It did, I thought to myself, man this crap is easy! Ha-ha, yeah right little did I know I would be out there for about 10 more hours
Well I figured my next task would be to run my 4 gauge down through the grommet in the firewall then along the driver’s side and to the amp which I was mounting under passenger side seat in the back. I choose this location because it was kind of stealth and I would still be able to fold the seats down which was a huge plus. Ouch, burned my arm in the engine compartment, better find something else to do.
So ran my ground wire. I found a nice bolt under the carpet and tested the ground with my DMM, worked great. So I bolted my ground wire down and ran it down to the amp.
My arm was still a little tender so I decided to give the engine a while longer to cool down, so I ran the new RCA's for the smaller amp up to my head unit. After this I was wondering how I was going to connect my remote wire to this amp. I figured it would be ok if I just spliced my new remote wire into the existing one. So I did that. I check the engine and things were cooler so I ran my hot wire through the grommet. I was cursing do that one, whoo boy. You have to be contortionist to get that thing in there man.
Well I was looking at the terminals on the amp and I realized all I had left was the speakers now. Since I had never taken a door panel off I had to bust out the Chilton’s manual. I popped the two screws out over the door handle and noticed the panel still stuck like crazy to the door. The Chilton’s said to stick a screwdriver in between the door and panel and pry it. I was scared of breaking something because I have never taken a door panel off before. After a while I just said screw it and pulled real hard. POP. Ah ****, I thought, that definitely sounded like plastic breaking. I looked under that little corner I had lifted up and saw a while peg. COOL! It’s supposed to work like that. After about 5 minutes I had the whole door panel off and the power window/lock switch was hanging in the air. I unbolted the stock speaker and its spacer. My first obstacle was how in the hell was I going to mount this round woofer in this hole which was for a 5x7. I figured they must have some kind of bracket to mount this speaker in this hole, somebody has to. I called around every car audio place in the greater phoenix area without results until I gave up and as a last resort called circuit city. I called one about 5 minutes from my house and they said they had such a thing but they didn’t have any in stock. So I called one about 20 minutes away from my house. The guy said they had them, score. So I reconnect the negative cable to the battery, hop in the car and go to circuit city. About halfway there I'm wondering my stereo sounds like crap. Oops, forgot to reconnect the right stock speaker. Oh well, I get to circuit and bring the new woofer in with me. When I showed the guy the speaker he was really impressed with it. Then I tell him I was the guy on the phone who was looking for the mounting adapter. The guy looks at me like "What?" I tell him what I need and he explains to me that there is no such thing, and that the speaker would require custom fabrication to install. Horseshit, so I drove 20 miles each way thanks to whatever stupidass I talked to on the phone. Lovely.
I stuck the stock spacer back in the whole and put the woofer in the hole. The plastic looked pretty weak and I figured if I screwed anything into it that it would crack but I decided to give it ago anyways. I drilled a small pilot hole in the bracket and zapped a screw right through it. I did the same thing on the opposite side and actually had a tight fit. Then I bolted the spacer back into the stock location and it all fit nice and snug. That was one thing out of the way but now I needed to decide where to mount the crossover. After looking at it for about 5 minutes and sticking the thing everywhere I could imagine I decided the best place for it would be horizontally mounted above the speaker. I looked at the door material and it seemed pretty thick but I thought I would be able to make it though. WRONG. I spent about 15 minutes trying to get a screw through that crap. It was dark by this time and the only light I was working by was the one on my carport, which wasn’t nearly enough. I decided to make a home depot run. I came back a half hour later with sheet metal screws and a million candle power spot light which plugs into the cigarette lighter. With the spotlight making it seem like daylight, I started working away with the sheet metal screws and even with those it took like 5 minutes per hole, even with me leaning on the drill as hard as I could. Well I had the crossover mounted to do the door finally. I put the door panel back on and oh ****, the crossover is about an eighth of an inch too far towards the door jamb. Well I had to take the box off and spend another 10 minutes attaching it an eighth to the right. Put the door panel back on and bam, just like stock. Sweet. Now all I had to do was mount the tweeter, the strip and crimp like 40 terminals onto the speaker wire I need to wire the speakers together.
I couldn’t find a good place to flush mount the tweeters because I didn’t have enough room in any of the few places I wanted to mount them. So I ended up surface mounting them right below the power mirror switch. I drilled a hole through it for some wire and the zapped a few screws though to hold it down. I think it turned out good. After about another hour I had the other side of the truck all wired up and I was ready to turn the on the sound. I reconnected the negative on the battery, said a prayer (I’m not religious man by any means) and turned it on. Nothing, no sound at all. Ahhh crap. Then I remembered that I had turned the gain all the way down on the amp so I didn’t blow the speakers when I first turned it on. So I ran around to the back and turned the gains up till I could hear something. Cool both speakers are working. I wanted to stretch the systems legs a little bit so I decided to go for a drive. I’m driving and it sounds to me like the right speakers aren’t working, which is weird because I know they were when I left the parking lot. I had only driven about a mile so I turned around. The Chilton’s manual had called for the windows to be down when the door panel was taken off so I had both windows down. It was about 1 in the morning it was a bit cold outside. I rolled up the passenger side window from the switch in my door then I rolled up the drivers. Or I attempted to. Halfway up the window was stuck. Crap. So now I had to fix the right side not working and the left side window not going up which meant I had to tear off both door panels again. I got it home and decided I would do the right side first. That side was easy; in my haste to get everything together and working I forgot to tighten down a screw on the terminal of the crossover. Cool. Then I tore off the door panel for the driver’s side. DOH. I had accident ran the wire for the woofer through the track of the window and when the window was going up it was getting caught on the cable. I put both door panels back on and went for another drive. Glad I didn’t get pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving because I had 90% of my attention adjusting my settings on the head unit. I pulled into jack in the box drive thru to get a shake and it was 2:14am, 12 hours after I had started.
Phew that was a lot of writing and no one probably read it, but oh well. Maybe someone who is contemplating installing component speakers in their X will learn something.
