i need some help i have an 89 mercury cougar i have had a stereo system in it for 2 yrs now and the other day the subwoofer box slide up and grounded the amp to the trunk and caught fire so i put it out and it burnt a ground wire off at the negative cable tht grounded out by the motor and now the other day i had hook the system bak up and put a new amp which was 1000 watt and the other was 600 watt the old one but any how now when i had the new system hooked up it was hitting pretty hard and blew a fuse up there at the motor and i put a new fuse in and i have a digital speedodometer cluster and now part of the lights on it are dim so now every now again the fuse will pop so i dont no what the problem can be and i need this car so i need some help please thank you
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Thanks!
Please provide more info, your post is a little (very) confusing. If you're blowing fuses it's usually due to a shorted wire or trying to put too much current through a circuit. Depending which fuse is blowing, this could be an easy diagnosis.
If you're trying to pull a lot of power for your stereo system through the stock wiring, you may be blowing the fuse for that reason. A high draw system may be best with a heavy duty relay (and a good inline fuse) directly off your battery and grounded to the chassis. You want to try to use as little factory wiring as possible for high draw items. The head unit/stereo itself may be fine on the stock wiring harness, but the amplifier for your speakers should be run on a separate circuit and ideally you should make a new one. This includes using heavy gauge wires going to all your speakers because stock wires may overheat and cause a fire or at least limit performance.
If you need a hint as to how to wire this, I would recommend consulting with a custom audio shop. If this is not an option, here's one idea. I can't specify required amperages or wire gauges because I don't know your setup. Run the head unit on the stock wiring harness. Its speaker outputs would all go to the amp inputs. For the amplifier, run a heavy gauge wire from your battery's positive terminal connector to a relay rated for a suitable amount of amperage for your system. Put in a suitably rated inline fuse as well so if you have a short you won't blow things up or cause a fire. The relay could be switched on using any source of [12v Hot on Start/Run]. These wires aren't hard to find with a wiring diagram, i.e. from a shop manual. Alternately you can wire it to be triggered by a dash switch or whatever you prefer. If you don't use a relay, that can be fine as long as the amp doesn't draw power (can be truly switched off) while you're not in the car and leave you with a dead battery. Some head units actually have an output wire made to turn on the amp via 12V to a relay or a signal wire to the unit. The point is you don't want the amp on all the time. Anyways, from there you can run the positive wire to the amp. Then you would run ground (-) to the frame or negative battery terminal. Run speaker wires directly from the amp with proper gauge wire to the speakers. Go all the way to the speakers; basically, 20 feet of heavy gauge wire to 1 foot of stock small wire will just give you the power capacity of the small wire.
Hope this helps.
As for the dim bulbs in the digital cluster, I need a little more info - is the fuse for the cluster blowing? The cluster can be removed and taken apart without too much work. I am actually working on installing one of those clusters into an Explorer. On both of the ones I got at the junkyard the stock illumination bulbs were burnt out; they appear to be a special type of filament can be replaced with more common bulbs in the stock receptacles fairly easily.
