My Ghetto Audio Install :D (pics)

[Solarian]

Walter showed up to come save my arse from my lack of audio hook up skills. He did most of the wiring so far, but we’ll be finishing it up tommorow.
It went a little something like this:
That’s me taking the door apart and Walter working away inside.

This is the new cone filter, my old one was so dirty that my car was losing power and had a rough idle.

We couldn’t think of where and how to mount the amp, so we ziptied it to the rear seat.

Close up of the zipties, my car is JDM tyte now

Note: The rear seat metal is SHARP! I cut myself

So did my friend Laleet

Two gorgeous cars, Laleet’s 10th Anny Turbo II and Walter’s S14.

Me working on squeezing the speaker cable through the door and Walter working on the harness.

Walter and his uber-1337 wiring skills!

We couldn’t get the screws off of the bracket, so I contemplated keeping the stocky and mounting the new one right under it.

My friend Laleet had a far better idea, long live the power drill!

One side down!

Now it’s the other one’s turn.

Now some problems occured right around this time. The deck wouldn’t power on. We tried putting the stock deck on, and that wouldn’t power on either. We were stumped. Finally, someone thought of plugging in the antenna on the stock deck as well. Miracle! It powered up. After searching through technical we found some good info on wiring a stereo. Turns out, the Nissan harness we bought from 2001 Audio Video, lead our ground wire to… NOTHING! We then cut the ground wire from the stupid harness that I paid 10 bucks for, and put it around one of the shifter screws like it was suggested. Power on baby!

By this point, I just put on a S5 knob that my friend Laleet had instead of the stockie. Feels so much better.
Now comes the amp! Here’s a shot of the fuse.

Now, we stopped there for the night, because we couldn’t find any holes in the firewall to run the amp power wire through, but here’s a pic of the mess we left in my car.

By searching here some more, I found out that the wire can be run through either the hood release latch hole or the ECU hole. Dunno why we couldn’t see either, but I’m gonna try again tommorow with Laleet and his brother. Wish me luck!

[GT1]

thats an awful place to put an amp…

theres 1000000 other better spots to put it.

GT

[iQuAGoD]

Whats wrong with mounting the amp to the seatback?

[Cal]

That shift knob looks out of place.

[SHIFT_KA24DET]

@iQuABoB

Whats wrong with mounting the amp to the seatback?

Nothing if he doesn’t cover it with the carpet…

Solarian I have to say this but coming from an Automotive Electronic
Assesory Technician that job makes me want to crawl in a whole in die…

FYI The 240sx does not have a ground to the deck it uses the Antenna as a
ground source. Problem with that is it is not sufficient for an aftermarket deck.
You have to remove the ground from the deck in the harness and attatch it to
a chassis ground close to the deck. By not doing this you run the risk of
running into a ground loop and causing serious alternator noise and potential
damage to the deck and amp.

[Twitchy]

240SX > you

actually its just as ghetto as my exhaust

[Solarian]

FYI The 240sx does not have a ground to the deck it uses the Antenna as a
ground source. Problem with that is it is not sufficient for an aftermarket deck.
You have to remove the ground from the deck in the harness and attatch it to
a chassis ground close to the deck. By not doing this you run the risk of
running into a ground loop and causing serious alternator noise and potential
damage to the deck and amp.

This is exactly what we did. Detached it from the rest of the harness, and grounded it on the metal plate over the shifter, which was reccomended by people on this forum. And if I were to pull the deck out right now and take some shots of the wiring, your fears would be put at ease, Walter did an AMAZING job of it, and it is super clean. The only ghetto part is how we went about it (drilling the stock deck to ge the brackets off, ziptying the amp, cutting ourselves, etc…)

And the amp would not be covered by carpet. I am putting the carpet over the amp, marking out where the amp is, then cutting that area out, so that the rest is carpeted, but there is a hole where the amp goes so it can cool. I am unskilled, not stupid, I’m quite aware that an amplifier needs cooling. We also intend to shove some wood pieces between the amp and the seatback, so that the amp is raised off of the seatback, and air can flow all around it.

edit: and the S5 knob will look better once I glue the boot to the base of it. Regardless, it’ll be replaced by an aftermarket knob anyway, and it feels sooooooo much nicer than the stock, so I’m keeping it for now.

[seth]

note to self take big black wire cut it and put it to one of the screws on the shifter… I always wondered why nissan did that with the antenna…
I never had any noise in my line with my alpine…
shrug.
This year its all going to be amped so I guess I will find out…
nice deck you have there btw. I had an earlier model for a few years.

[Solarian]

Thanks, I had only originally bought it, b/c it was cheap, but I got to like it along the way. When my celica died, I pulled it and kept it for my 240. It sounded awesome before with 4 speakers running directly off it, so it’s bound to sound even better now that it’ll be amped on infinity kappas.

[GT1]

i mean witht he zip ties and the lack of carpet and stuff.

thank is all… maker it look pretty itll be fine

GT

[Lith]

hehe, that’s pretty funny…

but I installed my cd/mp3 deck in about 2 hours all by myself… granted, I did have a cable running from the positive battery terminal all the way to the trunk for the amp, but that’s all

[system]

ewwww Integra shiftknob…and zipties man, thats brutal. spend some extra time and do things right so you dont have to do it twice…
Seems to me I never had any issues mounting my amp and cap…

[TheDecline]

you can run your power cable through a little drain on the firewall that leads to the evaperator coil. its on the passanger side near the bottom of the firewall and should be easily visable. i ran 4ga through there for my battery relocation

[Wiltzor]

@Shift_Krunk

ewwww Integra shiftknob…and zipties man, thats brutal. spend some extra time and do things right so you dont have to do it twice…
Seems to me I never had any issues mounting my amp and cap…

rx7 shift knob actually.

and the zipties are jdm, holding on the inverted amp…also quite jdm.

[system]

regardless that knobs still dutty
and i dont think that the letters “JDM” cover up that ****** install.
and you cant find a hole in the firewall??? :roll:

Your car. Just my thoughts :?:

[Solarian]

Hehe, yea it is an RX-7 shift knob, and I’m quite fond of how it feels.
The wiring and everything was ran fine, amp was connected… and it blew the fuse immediately. Any ideas why this might be? The guy working with me just said I need a bigger fuse… but that doesn’t sound quite kosher to me. That fuse came with the 4 gauge wiring kit, so it should’ve been good enough. When we reconnected the battery, a spark showed up, and the fuse blew. The guy then tried to bypass the fuse just to test the amp, and a big spark showed up again as he tried to touch the two wires together. I’m stumped. I’ll be going over to his house today to finish the install, I ran all the speaker wiring, but didn’t have time to put them in, since my gf wanted to go out (yea I’m whipped pretty hard) The amp will be properly carpeted.

[system]

Im not too sure about the fuse… you are fine with 4ga, and thats not too big of an amp… ummmm, check ur ground to the amp. grab some sand paper, sand the paint of the ground ur using, and spray it with some white lithium grease…disconnect the battery when u hook it up dude, then turn it on and it should be fine…

[Solarian]

We did sand the paint off where we drilled the screw for the ground, and are using gold plated terminals. I’m gonna go get some lithium grease to put on as well. The guy that did it is not a pro (as in gets paid for it), but he’s done his own installs in the past, and they’ve been far more expensive and elaborate than mine (he ran 3 12" JL Audios on several Excelon amps + another 4ch, had a big f*in cap and maybe even an upgraded alternator)
What I want to know, is it normal for the spark to happen when I’m re-connecting the battery terminals? Or did I just do it slowly like a dumbass and that’s why it sparked? I dunno, b/c I don’t wanna keep buying more and more fuses and blowing them. And when I do go buy another fuse, should I get same size? Or bigger?

[Solarian]

Install completed today. The sound is nice and clear, but has a disturbing lack of bass. I’m seriously considering saving up and getting a sub.
The problem with the fuses was this… The way the batt & gnd terminals are right next to eachother on the amp… We only had a jacket over the gnd terminal, and when we shoved them into the amp, the connector for the batt wire cut the jacket on the gnd and direct grounded itself. So we kept blowing out fuses. I was fiddling around with it, and then I noticed it. We got new jackets, on BOTH connectors, hooked it up and she powered on like a charm.
Now I do have one problem. My stupid deck, turns off my amp when I switch to CD. I can listen to the radio just fine, but when I press CD, amp turns off. So I’m wondering if it’s possible, to splice the remote wire for the amp, into the accessory power that the deck receives, so that my amp will be on everytime there’s accessory power. I realize this runs the amp everytime my car is on, but I listen to music all the time anyway, so I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea. It’s either that, or get a new deck. My friend that works at Best Buy can get me a sweet Eclipse deck for 230 bucks, but at the moment that’s 230 bucks more than what I have.
Eclipse deck: http://www.eclipse-web.com/cd/cd5425.html
And you can see my Panasonic deck in the prev pics. It’s not the best of decks, but it’s not crap either.

[240sxy]

@GT_GREG

thats an awful place to put an amp…

theres 1000000 other better spots to put it.

GT

mines mounted on my back seat too