wiring it up

[sciguy007]

my kenwood 600x1 amp and 2 infinity kappa perfect 12s are on the way, and i want to have the wiring ready. i already have the 4-guage power wire, 8 guage ground wire, and 18-gauge turn on wire. now i need to know some other things. will the alternator and battery i have (stock) be able to handle all the power? if not, what should i upgrade too? 130? 200 amp? also, is 4-guage wire too large for 600 watts? thanks.

 

[mrsteve]

4-guage is perfect for 600 watts. You should also have 4-guage ground wire too. The stock electrical system will handle the 600 watts but not too much more.

Steve

 

[Trapper14]

make sure you have a fuse incase something happens, IN-LINE fuse

 

[JTang]

Is that 600 watts max or RMS? It's okay to have a 4 guage going to a distribute block and then to 8 guage to the amp, but if you can find one of those wire guage adapters, you might be able to hook the 4 guage directly up to the amp instead. It'll be between 5 and 10 bucks.

Depending on how "complete" you want your install to be will decide how much extra stuff you'll want to buy.

You do need the inline fuse no further than 18" from the battery. It needs to be a waterproof fuse holder, they're usually cylindrical in shape. They can be as cheap as $5, but they'll only hold AGU fuses, with a maximum of 60 amps.

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After that, you're using a different kind of blade fuse, that is much more expensive, like $10 for 2 or 3, and THEN, the fuse holder is much more expensive too.

You need to decide how you're going to attach a 4 guage wire to your battery. You can either buy new battery terminals (bare minimum $20), or if you have a side batter post for extra connections, you can buy wire ring terminals. There are two kinds, the $2.50 ones that you can use over and over:

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Or the crimp-ons, though barely cheaper require you to use tons of elbow grease and perhaps some ingenuity to properly crimp a small metal piece about 2 or 3 mm thick.

If you go through the firewall on your own, it's good to get grommets so that the car metal can't cut into the wire and set your car on fire. I recommend going a bit further and getting these, you'll never worry ever again:

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You still should also have a fused distribution block so that you can turn your 4 guage wire and split it up if you want to, just in case you want to add another amp. If you're just going to have the one amp, then you can ace this.

If you do want another amp in the future, though, you should also get a grounding block to collect all your 8 guage wires again to be grounded into one 4 guage wire again. To ground the 4 guage, you can either use a 4 guage crimp ring, or get a 4 guage grounding terminal.

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Sorry it's so long, but those are the basic necessities to get best potential from your amps and to keep your car from catching on fire.

If you want to go even further get a tiny fuse for the remote line lead and install it behind the head unit. If it grounds, the remote is usually toast and you'll have to figure out another way to turn on the amp. $1 protection is all you need.

 

[leenjen]

make sure your ground wire is at least as thick as your power wire going into the amp. and definately get a fuse. a car fire is not a pretty site.

 

[sciguy007]

so i need some kind of adapter to hook a 4-guage line from the battery to the amp? what about the ground do i need an adapter there too? btw its 600 watts rms, 1200 max.

 

[leenjen]

why would you need an adapter? just hook up the + to the + battery terminal (but make sure you put a fuse near the battery), and the ground to metal on the vehicle.

 

[JTang]

Originally posted by sciguy007
so i need some kind of adapter to hook a 4-guage line from the battery to the amp? what about the ground do i need an adapter there too? btw its 600 watts rms, 1200 max.

It'll depend. To hook a fat wire like that up to a battery you can go multiple ways: Buy a fancy new car battery clamp that also facilitates the 4 guage wire and your existing wires.

If your battery has side posts too, you could attach your audio power wire there, just buy either the screw on or crimp connector ring to your wire and attach it there (unless you can attach it to your existing battery clamp).

Your last option is to buy a small post adapter that screws on to your existing battery clamp and mimics a second battery post. Then you'd just connect another smaller cheaper battery clamp on to that one. It looks sort of awkward though cause then you have two battery clamps sitting on top of each other.

Those links above should go directly to the products that you'll be looking at. You could go with crimp ons, but I tried them and I totally messed mine up cause I couldn't crimp them correctly being so thick.