craftsman.: car stereo [2].

Bleh. After I installed the new stereo in Spencer, I realized it could sound even better... with an amp and a subwoofer! The thing is... I already had both, and they'd been taking up space in a basement cupboard ever since Oliver (my previous car, a '95 Toyota Tercel) was totaled - although I ended up selling him to my now father-in-law for him to use as a commuter. He stills drive Oliver... I think.

But anyway - I had an old subwoofer and amp sitting down there, along with all of the necessary cables (power for the battery, ground, turn-on, RCA, and 16-gauge speaker wire) in a plastic bin, also just taking up space. And so I carved out a couple of evenings before Jeff's and my road trip to Glacier National Park to get them installed...

First, I had to get power from the battery through the firewall, which turned out to be pretty easy. I poked a scratch awl through the main rubber grommet where most of the wiring was already being routed -

Then - after taping the 8-gauge power cable to a piece of 12-gauge electrical cable - I stuck them both through the hole, then reached up under the pedals on the driver's side of the firewall and yanked the mess through -

Along with everything else I already had, I installed the battery fuse. It was just a simple matter of connecting the 18" lead from the battery to the fuse box -

So power then was done. Next, the amp (an old Phoenix Gold XS4300) -

came with a potentiometer that adjusts the bass output I needed to install -

I had the perfect spot - right next to the 12V adapter in front of the stick shift. So I just quick drilled it -

When I had yanked the stereo before selling Oliver, I apparently (not sure why?) cut the cable for the pan pot. The thing is, the end is a 4-cable telephone jack. So I had to go get a box of jacks. Thankfully, from all of the structured wiring I've done in the house, I already had the CAT5 and RJ11 crimper. So it was really easy -

Then I plugged it into the amp -

I'd later find out... it didn't work. After double-checking I had crimped the wires correctly in the jack, I inspected the connection at the pan pot side. Yep - only the black wire was hanging on, so I had to break out the soldering iron to reconnect the other three (my wife helped hold the soldering flux) -

And done -

Well, it's backwards - so turning the pot right turns down the volume on the sub, but whatever. Maybe some day I'll fix it. I probably should have read this first... so I'll probably end up rewiring it.

*** UPDATE 10.11.16 - yeah, it bugged me. So I fixed it. (I just reversed the black wire to the other end, then put the green/yellow in the middle, and the red where the black had been) ***

Anyway... next, I had to run a bunch more cabling, which is how I spent the rest of that first night - just pulling cable through the car after removing a bunch of the trim sections. The power turn-on lead went over to run alongside the speaker and power cables under the door trim (you can run power with high-level speaker wire without getting any noise interference, but not with low-level RCA cables - those must be placed away from power cables or engine whine will likely be a problem through the system), and speaker wire went into the trunk for the subwoofer.

I gave it a valiant effort to pull the 16-gauge speaker cable through the factory door boot on the driver's side to connect the component speakers in the doors but... nope, it wasn't happening. So I ended up just splicing the 16-gauge stuff onto the factory wiring harness adapter -

After all was said and done, it kind of looked like a huge mess -

Note: power, ground, and turn-on lead on the left along with the speaker wire (the amp's inputs are arranged intentionally, with power and speaker inputs on one side, and RCA inputs on the other), and the RCA and pan pot on the right. I did some quick level-setting before bolting the seat back in so I could leave the next day to pick up Jeff at Sea-Tac and make the drive across the Pac NW to Glacier...

Just a couple of days after returning though, I was driving home from work and all of a sudden the sub sounded awful - like it was rattling something obnoxious. So I pulled it out of the little enclosure and inspected. Bleh - in the seven years of sitting down in the basement, the foam surround had deteriorated and begun to separate from the speaker cone -

Rather than spend $500 on a new sub (which may or may not fit the same volume box I had), I opted to go the thrifty route and spend a whopping $20... on a replacement foam surround kit from Simply Speakers. Brilliant. Then got to work scraping off the old surround -

The kit comes with the foam surround (duh) and some special glue that works pretty quickly, but still allows time to line up the speaker cone's voice coil in the magnet to make sure it's not rubbing during its length of travel. In a couple hours, I had the new foam all glued (to the cone and the frame) and the gasket reapplied -