What One Will Do For Tunes

Long ago I got good advice from “Kelsey” at Best Buy. She told me how to install a headunit and where to go to buy connectors. For that I’m grateful. I went back to Best Buy but she had moved on to Car Toys. Car Toys are the worst sort of rapist. The sort of place you go for an estimate and they tell you it will cost $2000 to put a new stereo in your car. I imagine 90% of their profit comes from ripping people off. But Kelsey is there now… let’s see what Kelsey says.

I happen to arrive at Car Toys on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. A day with lots of sales. What you know they have a nice Kenwood X397 for $75. Kelsey says it’s a good unit and a good deal so I get it along with a harness and a dash frame. Comes with “free installation”. Sweet.

I make an appointment for the install, before I leave Kelsey warns that I need to check all the speakers and make sure they work. The Kenwood has a feature where it will detect shorts in the speakers and will shut down if load drops below 4 Ohmns…

Ok, I’ve a job set out, I know for a fact the cheap awful speaker cable under the mats in my car doesn’t connect to anything, and I think its 18-20gauge, probably fine but just so awful and scrubbed up. Need something better run from the rear speakers up to the front. I hit up Vetco for some good thick cable. They have a reel of 12g with 28feet left on it, they let me have it for the price of 24 feet which comes to $24. This is seriously nice thick stiff cable, very easy to run by just pushing it through.

Spent a few hours running the cable from the rear speakers, out the seatbelt slots, under the carpet, along the rear door, across the base of the B-Pillar, along the base of the front door, through the paneling, under the front carpet to the center console. Lots of bits of plastic to remove and reinstall and of course many many little screws. In the end there are two nice ends all ready to go.

I don’t have time to check the fronts but trust they’ll be fine… what could go wrong. L

I bring car in for an appointment and Kelsey takes almost 3 hours to do the install. Lots of figuring out what the wires mean given she’s organizing a random old harness into a modern one. The bad news is that the front speakers are toast and I need new ones. She recommends some Pioneers as they are very shallow, I promise to measure and get what is appropriate. But while waiting and listening to their selection I buy a pair of JL Audio C2 400X 4” speakers, $90 on sale. The silk tweeters are very warm and they sound great to me though have little bass as one would expect from a 4” speaker. They’re 1.8” deep which seems shallow. Finally the install is done, I’ve a stereo that takes an iPhone, finally rockin’ tunes after 11 months. Yeah, it is just coming from the rear but it sure sounds good. Can’t wait to get those front speakers installed.

Take off the passenger door and find a 6” Kenwood speaker. Whoa! I don’t need to settle for puny 4” speaker, I can get 6” for much better bass. Back to Car Toys the next day and return the C2-400x for a pair of C2-600X. That night I attempt to install and find that the shape of the magnet and housing on the 600 makes them impossible, much too large and deep to clear the window. The speakers didn’t even come out of the bag. I really want to keep the stock speaker grills so they’ll need to go back. The whole time I’m super happy with the tunes coming from the rear speakers. Can’t believe I went this long without!

One sad moment, I arrive at work to find a strap of metal plumbers tape and a screw sitting on the floor, the stereo is loose… looks like it wasn’t attached very well and has fallen out.

Next day I return the C2-600x and get the C2-400x again. The next morning I wake early and install the new speakers. I seem to be making a lot of dumb mistakes, mixing up the leads, etc but I finally get everything mounted and connected well. Wow I have good sound now. Just delicious. I’m super happy with the choice of front speakers. Driving to work its freezing cold. I turn on the heater blower and in about a second the head unit is flashing “protect”. Uh oh. That wasn’t happening before. Perhaps something is wrong with the front speaker wiring?

Drop back into car toys to get a more secure install of the head unit. Not acceptable to have it fall out. They agree and it takes 45 minutes for the dude to find a better way to secure it, that includes removing and reinstalling the dash and its 11 screws.

I return home to experiment with that pesky protect mode. I find several odd data points:

–          Protect occurs if blower is set above level 2, but the blower works at level 1 and 2, that means it is not the blower switch resistor.

–          At idle the car voltage drops to 12 when blower is on, pretty big drop…

–          With fade set to send all sound to front speakers, the passenger side speaker is louder than the driver’s side. Oh, and the driver’s side speaker makes sound when balance is full right…. There is a connection between driver and passenger side… ?

Friday night I wait until family is asleep and move truck into the garage in order to keep myself a little warmer and take advantage of the lights in the garage. Remove the dash and head unit. Remove driver’s door panel since that speaker is acting strange. Out comes the MultiTester. Exploring the harness, reading the Kenwood wiring manual, all is going well until around 11:30pm… the head unit cuts out entirely. Shit. Is that protect? No, the head unit won’t power on. It is too late I need to sleep. Dreams of a shorted head unit and needing to buy another…. I wake early and worry. Dang, did I toast it by doing something stupid? Worry, worry.

Afternoon I have another few hours to diagnose. I find no voltage coming to the stereo from the harness, which is good news. Turns out there’s not even power to the Radio Fuse. I look in engine bay but nothing wrong there. I check the relays in the fuse box, they’re good, as are the rest of the fuses. Fuse in head unit is good. What can it be? Finally I find continuity between one side of fuse and yellow, but there the ground is gone. What the heck? Head behind the fuse box I see an odd red wire coming from the radio fuse.

Digging all over everywhere I finally notice a loose wire behind the dash. Shit! Last night I remember finding a bare red wire not connected to anything, I’d taped it up and away since it served no purpose. Well 5 of the wires I taped away had no purpose, the 6^th was the ground and needed to connect to the harness. I confirm the red wire is the dead side of the radio fuse plug. I recrimp the previously bare red wire into the empty crimp and now the head unit will power on again. Phew! Not a good use of 90 minutes but I guess I learned to trace voltage and continuity to figure out what I have here.

So back to the speaker with my new found debugging skills I test continuity between the harness and the driver’s side speaker plugs. Negative wire is fine but positive wire is NOT FINE. It connects to both the positive and negative of the passenger side speaker… and not to the left negative terminal… I guess it was being driven out of phase with the positive wire which is why some sound came out. The problem wire can’t be traced since it goes into the 1.5” thick wire bundle behind the dash. Solution: I enlist some speaker cable I had around the house that came from my friends truck before it went to the junk yard, I wire the driver’s side speaker with new wire back to the dash. I’ve no doubt this will work and sure enough it does.

Now there is still a potential issue. Given that the left negative wire was previously connected to both positive and negative passenger side wire, doesn’t that mean the passenger side is shorted positive to negative? Well it seems to be playing well, I’ll leave it for now but that is something to watch. Maybe I can fix in my free time. I’ll need a symptom though before I bother it: reopen dash, open the passenger door and diagnose, that’s a very busy hour, not counting time to run a new wire and splice into the existing wire before it reaches the door.

I turn ignition and get wonderful tunes from every speaker. Toggle heater blower and no issue, yay.

Reinstall everything and put the mass of tools and parts back and away. Car stereo installers earn their pay.

After all of that, I’ve got a single photo of success:

At long last. What a huge pain that was. Def Worth It!

LED Brake Lights

Brake light burned out. Went to store and they had these Kool led lights at the checkout. Shoot. No heat, bright, last forever. Expensive ($16).

Installed one for comparison. It really doesn’t get hot. It appears very bright to the eye but when I took the pics it doesn’t seem so bright. I think the light from the LED is very intense but not wide like the standard bulb. You can see in the photo below that the LED doesnt’ seem to use the reflector, it emits light straight back at you.

Wife and kids all agree its brighter so I’ll keep them. Burned my finger removing the old bulb on the left.

Light pattern on led seems to come straight out at camera, doesn’t use reflector so much.

Comparing left and right, the left is the stock light, right is the new fancy LED. Seems dim, eh?

Junk and Jewelry

Found a new knob for the transfer case shifter. It’s nice to have the pattern on it. This was $15 from cruiserparts:

New transfer shift knob, now with shift pattern!

It’s surprising how easy it is to find parts for this thing. Took me months to find the shift knob for my 930. Judging from the different size this may not be correct though, but what do I care? I want to see the shift pattern on the knob, and at least this pattern is correct.

If you’re wondering what a transfer case is…

Transfer Case and Locking Hubs

This vehicle is 4 wheel drive. Or, its got a transmission that can be configured to drive all four wheels. Normally the vehicle only drives the two rear wheels. This is done for efficiency. When 4wd is needed there are two things that must be done.

1: the hubs must be locked. The front hubs on this vehicle can be locked and unlocked. Locked means the wheel turns with the axle. Unlocked means the wheel turns independently of the axle. This unlocked state is the low friction state, the wheels just spin on their bearings. When the hubs are locked the wheels move with the front axle and differential, which is less efficient.

2: the transfer case must be set to one of the two 4WD modes. These modes cause power to be directed to the front differential and then to the axles. The transfer case is a second transmission. Its just like the main transmission except it has fewer gears. The main transmission has 5 forward gears, neutral, and a reverse gear. The transfer has 2WD, 4WD, Neutral, and 4 WD Low. This transfer case connects the main transmission and the wheels, so each of its settings can be applied to each of the main transmissions gears. If we consider the main transmission to have 6 unique gears (not counting neutral), and the transfer case has 3 unique gears, then the car has 18 settings. The difference between 2WD and 4WD is that the front wheels are given power, the difference between 4WD and 4WD low is that in low mode the transfer lowers the ratio of each gear. If first gear normally gets you to 7mph, in 4WD Low you’ll get to 3.5mph before needing to shift. These low gears are useful offroad as you have nearly infinite torque and the ability to compression brake down very steep hills.

In situations where you might be changing between 2WD and 4WD, it is ok to leave the hubs locked and the transfer case in H2. This means the transfer only drives the rear wheels, the front is left to move as it will. When the front wheels are locked the front axles are turning with the wheels, the axles turn the differential, and the differential spins the pinon shaft between the differential and the transfer case. When transfer is changed from H2 to H4 the transfer now locks the front pinion to the engine and 4wd is engaged. I guess back in the day this was luxury! You can change from 2WD to 4WD without going out in the elements and dealing with a freezing muddy hub.

Yes!? Luxury!

De-Rusting that Junky Old Spare Tire Carrier:

In other news, I’ve been working to de-rust the spare tire-carrier that was included with the car. It was pretty rusty and I don’t have access to a media blaster. Instead I’m using phosphoric acid to convert the rust to calcium phosphate which is pretty easy to scrub off. Man I wish I had access to a media blaster.

By the time I’m done it might be warm enough to give it a coat of epoxy paint. Check out this piece of junk, isn’t it something that this has value?

The spare tire carrier. It was pretty rusty, now all that white stuff is calcium phosphate, converted rust.

The bolts to hold this to the frame are $1.25 each, so this isn’t a big deal to install. Only issue I don’t see to have the tool that’s used to lower the tire. It’ll be nice to get that tire out of the back of the truck.