those with 2000+, how did you guys route your rca cables?

[ttc_smokee]

i just received my 4channel and 2channel 6 meter rca cables, and i've mounted my 4channel amp on the rear deck plastic, and the sub amp will be mounted on its box in the trunk, but how did you route your rcas from the back of the headunit through the dash to the kick panel, so that i can run it through the bottom of the floor panels? i hope that made sense

[JayGXP]

you just have to snake it the best you can behind the dash and make you way to the floor rail. once you get you hands in there and start going. it all will fall into place.

but i would first snake it from the driver side floor rail up to the head unit. so that way you wont have to pull so much through. and you should run the remote along side the RCA's so you cut out a little bit of work.

i dont have any pictures right now but if your still confused ill snap a few tomorrow and post them up.


i hope i helped alittle

[ttc_smokee]

hey thanks, you've pretty much answered all of the questions that i've posted on here, and I got a pretty good idea of what needs to be done, thanks again

[JayGXP]

no problem. that what were all here for.

[Bugsi]

Just a week ago I ran new front door speaker wires from my trunk amp, along with 6 channels of RCA's and power-on wires that were installed by previous installers. My car is a 97, so the areas under the dash are probably different, but I still wanted to give you these comments:

With all the previous wiring plus the new wiring I was installing, along with the car alarm that was previously wired in, I had a rat's nest of wiring under my dash. The existing wires were all tangled amongst each other, and adding new speaker wires was just making things ridiculous.

So I re-did everything. I yanked out the rear seat, disconnected all the RCA's and power-on wires from the amps, removed the trim plastics over the side rails, and pulled all the wires out the open driver's door into the driveway. With everything out in the open I was able to untangle everything and get all the wires arranged neatly. Then I bundled them all into a 1" diameter plastic split-loom tube along with the new front door speaker wires. That made things MUCH NICER under the dashboard and running under the driver's side rail, instead of the rat's nest of unprotected and tangled wires I previously had. With everything neatly bundled I ran the loom along the factory harness loom down the driver's side and into the trunk.

Now everything looks factory, no bare wires running around, and my wires have a little extra protection in the harness loom. Of course you can run wires without the split-loom, but it made everything very neat, very clean, and very easy to install. I recommend it highly.
-Mark

[ttc_smokee]

is it hard to run the speaker wire through the door, so that i can route it though the kick panel and along the side of the car?

[grandprix104]

I found it to be a royal pain to get speaker wire in/out of the door. The rubber conduit that the wires go through is tightly molded and taped around the factory wiring harness and is just an unbelievable pain to get to. You cant just feed the wire through it like most cars. I'm sure it can be done but I ended up just tapping into the factory wires in the kick panel instead. Depending on what kind of power you will be sending to the door speakers you don't really need larger wire so this would work. If you sending high watts to the speakers you will want to use thicker speaker wire though, so good luck with that.

[Bugsi]

And I found the opposite to be true for pre-2000. I poked the wire through the door wiring tube from inside the door aiming towards the kick panel, and the stiffness of the wiring alone was enough to easily fish its way to the kick panel where I could pull it through.

The use of thicker gauge wiring gets more important when the wiring runs are long. Wire conductor resistance multiplies per unit length, so short runs of thin wire do not dramatically increase the load, where longer runs of the same wire gauge can have significant resistance.

As a brief example: If we consult a standard chart for copper wire resistances like this one: http://www.interfacebus.com/Copper_Wire_AWG_SIze.html
We can see that a 20 foot run of 22 gauge copper wire has about a third of an ohm resistance. If you used 20 feet of 22 gauge wire to hook up your 2 ohm speakers, you'll be losing just over 14% of your power to the wiring. Compared to running 20 feet of 14 gauge wire, where you'd lose only 2.5% of your power to the wiring. Compare both of these to running 19 feet of 14 gauge wiring plus 1 foot of 22 gauge wiring, where you'd lose just over 3% of your power to the wiring.

What you can learn and apply from this exercise is that even if you were unable to run new wires through the door grommets to your door speakers, you could still benefit from running larger wires from your amp just up to the kick panels, and then splice to the short length of factory wiring that goes through the grommet to the speaker.

-Mark

[grandprix104]

sweet that was very informative

[ttc_smokee]

yeh that was informative thanks

[Bonneureka]

Great advice on the door grommets! The geek in me needed to see the math!

As for the RCA cables, that was the easier task! Once the rear seat bottom is out (so that's where the battery is!!!) there are two bolts and 4 clips that hold the seat back in place. Be careful here! Remove the bolts and press down on the clips with a flat tip screwdriver. A picture here is very helpful. Do not pry the seat back out, press down on the clips and the seat back should pop out.

Once the seat is out you have access to the trunk from the cabin. Snake the RCA's to the passenger side. Remove the lower door sills, the center column facia, and remove the 4 bolts holding down the passenger seat and prop it out of the way. I found the electrical connections her too much to mess with so I tipped the seat on its side to get better access to the inner rail. I tied the RCAs, the remote amp wire, and 14 gauge speaker wire to an existing run of conduit which leads up under the dash. Remove the glove box and there is tons of access to under the dash and side access to the radio cavity. Its sounds like a lot to do, but there's nothing worse than spending tons of time and cash and having wires poking out from under the carpet! Do not spare the wire ties. They are cheap insurance.

[Bugsi]

Wow. Blast from the past.