s14 wiring "mess"..please help!

Well, I just recently purchased a 1995 s14 from a member of this board. I’m trying to wire a deck into the car, but am having quite a problem. There were only harness plugs for the HVAC controls, defrost and hazards, thats it, the rest was just ALOT of different wires.

I went to an auto wreckers and got the harness plugs for the rest. I figured out that there were two plugs for the cigarette lighter, two for the stereo, and two random ones that are left over. I don’t know what they plug into.

My main focus right now is to get the deck hooked up. I checked out a couple installed websites (12volt.com) but I had no luck with that. The colors they have listed were not the colors I have. I’ve found that there are several wires that are the same color, i.e 3 red with blue stripe wires. www.12volt.com also lists the ground wire as gray, I don’t have a gray wire in sight.

I got an aftermarket harness adapter and plugged it into the stock harness leads to try and trace back which wires are what, and wire it up accordingly, but I’ve still had no luck. I’ve checked fuses on both the deck, and under the hood, and neither are blown.

If anyone can help me, or refer me to a thread or website that can clarify this problem or me, that would be great.

Additionally, the car I got the harness leads from was a 97 s14. I don’t know if that makes a difference or not??

if you have a multimeter or volt meter it would help a lot.

if you have one or can borrow one, start by measuring for constant voltage, this connects to the yellow wire from the deck. then find your accessory (a wire that will switch between +12V when the car is turned to accessory and 0V when the car is off, this connects to the red wire on the deck. ground the black wire to the car somewhere, factory nissan stereo ground wires tend to have problems.

once you have that, see if the deck powers up and works (without sound of course).

once that works, look for speakers, this is the tricky part. there are a couple ways to do it… you can pull the speakers out and see what colour the wires are on the back of it, then match it to the wires behind the deck, this is a bit time consuming… though it’s an ideal time to put in new speakers if you’re going to anyway.

or you can take somewhat random guesses with a pair of wires and a 9V battery, sometimes the pairs of speaker wires will be twisted together from factory, i don’t think nissan does this however. most of the time there will be 2 wires that are similar in some way… like both have a yellow stripe or there are 2 blue wires, one with a black strip, one without, etc. once you have a pair of wires you suspect to be a speaker, touch one wire to each side of the 9V battery. if you get no sound then they aren’t a pair, if you get a “pop” noise from a speaker then you’ve found one. listen for which speaker it is coming from and connect it to the appropriate wire on the wiring harness for the deck.

hope that helps, good luck.

jay, give me a shout - im off work thursday-saturday

ive got a voltmeter and test light so we can hardwire everything too the ignition, speakers, ect ect

shoot me an email address, maybe I can find time to send you some pics.

also that 97 harness piece may give you trouble, I have found a lot of plugs are different in 97 vs 95…

Alright, I used a voltmeter and checked every single wire when the car was off, and when it was on and now of them shouwed any reading! I’m at a loss. None of the fuses were blown, I checked under the hood and by the passenger rest pedal and they were fine. Am I missing something here? This is my first time working on a Nissan’s wiring so I want to be sure I’ve covered everything and haven’t missed anything. Any help/advice at this point would be great. Thanks!

ill head up to kristens with ya one day to see if we can figure it out

found my camera,

I will send you pics tonight…

not sure if it helps. but nissan loves to used case ground rather than a wire lead… so that radio bracket to floor = ground

I also read that there is a ground through the antenna?? Never heard of that before. I’ll link the source I found that information from if I come across it again.

Thanks S13GG