October 17, 2001
Now that Deja is drivable, I've been driving her all over. We go to the store to get groceries, we run into town to pick up lunch, I even went to guitar lessons once, which is way the heck on the other side of town. It's not even a big deal to hop in and go to Vernon's, which is 35 minutes away. Lotsa fun! But there is one downside - no tunes! Deja is stuck back in 1968 with an original AM radio. What's a girl to do?
Well, I finally got tired of singing to myself on these outings and decided to take the plunge and buy a radio for it. I looked into a Custom Autosound radio, and they have some neat stuff, but all this terrorist stuff has been hell on the toy business, so I had to look for a solution that didn't require such deep pockets. Which is how I ended up down at the local autoparts store handing over my credit card for an AM/FM Cassette with two 5 inch speakers (a whopping 7 watts of power each!!!) for the princely sum of $50.
Oooohhhh, it's
a RAMPAGE :-)
Yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's as bottom of the line as you can get. The buttons are loose, it doesn't even have any memory buttons, even the '68 AM radio had those cool pushbuttons. You turn the knob to tune the radio in, and it moves a little pointer back and forth across the dial, just like in the old days. But it will do the job for now. I can always swap it out later. I just need some tunes, man...
So I tore my car apart again.
|
The radio sat on my bench for a week before I got up the guts to tear my
interior out again. I ended up removing the back seat top and bottom, the rear interior
quarter on the driver side (which required disconnecting the seat belt), both sill plates,
and both kick panels. And the rear package shelf. But before removing the rear package shelf, hold it down while an assistant in the trunk draws the outline of the speaker holes on the underside of it. |
|
I used the template that came with the speakers to draw a circle in the middle of the outline for the speaker hole. As you can see, you can fit a considerably larger speaker here without cutting any metal in your rear support. |
|
Then I used a sharp boxknife to cut around the circle. Cut a little at a time and eventually you will get through it, and not mess up your package shelf. It's just heavy cardboard, so you don't want to crease or tear it. |
|
Check that the speaker fits |
|
And screw it down using the provided hardware. If I had this to do over again, I would have moved the template as close to the top of the oval as possible, to leave more room for the connections at the bottom. As it was, I had to bend them to keep them from touching the metal of the rear support after I installed them. You might want to check this out carefully before you cut. |
|
Tah-dah, that looks really nice. Be sure to get the logo straight with the edge of the package shelf so when it's installed it doesn't look sloppy. |
|
Then I installed the wires so it would be ready to drop in. I didn't get
to take pictures of the next step, but I dropped the rear shelf and speakers into place,
and brought the wires from the trunk, through a hole over the rear wheelwell into the
cabin. I wiretied the wires together as I went, keeping them nice and neat. I ran them
down the curve of the wheelwell to the bottom of the rear quarter window on the driver's
side. I tied them down where I could to keep them from wiggling, and protected them with
some plastic wire-wrap where they might rub on metal. I fed them through to the channel
that runs under the sill plate, up behind the kick panel, above the steering column, tying
it to existing wiring harnesses to keep it out of the way of the pedal linkages, and
finally it was over at the radio area. I had to buy some extra speaker wire to make it
this distance. The stuff in the kit must have been intended for door speakers. If you can, I'd recommend you bring it up on the passenger side, because it's easier to work under the dash on that side. I couldn't because I have a trunk mounted battery, and the channel under the sill plate on the passenger side has the battery cable in it. You could also run it under the carpet as long as you try to keep it where it won't get stepped on, because eventually it would break. That was the most time consuming part of this project. |
|
The original radio comes out when you remove the four screws that hold the
bezel in, and the one nut in the back that holds the radio's rear support. I examined how the radio was plugged in, and wanted to use that connection for power, but my test light showed no juice there. I poked around and discovered a blown fuse for the interior lights. I replaced it, but it blew right away again. According to the schematics, they aren't related, but the radio fuse was fine, so I don't know why else the radio would not have had power. |
|
I went ahead and installed the radio anyway, and it fit perfectly. No problems there, at least. |
|
The antenna cable normally comes in from a hole high up on the side of the passenger's footwell. However, I had removed the antenna when I gave the car to Vernon to be finished up, and someone decided it was the perfect place to run the battery cable through. So I drilled a new hole for the antenna, put a gromit in it to keep from rubbing through the cable, and that worked fine. This will all be hidden behind the kick panel anyway. |
|
The new radio antenna has an oval base. The original antenna had a smaller, round base. The antenna rod unscrews for car washes, or more importantly, so I can put the new car cover on without poking a hole in it. I had to buy a car cover because the weatherstripping lets in rain sometimes, and the car isn't going to have the luxury of a garage this winter. |
|
So now all the components were in place. I connected the speakers to the radio. You have to keep track of right and left speaker wire as you go along, and you must be able to tell the + and - ends apart for each speaker. I put a connector on the end of each speaker wire, and a matching end on each wire coming from the radio. I did this because it makes them easy to connect, and easy to reconnect if I connected them wrong. It also will make it easy to replace the radio someday when it breaks. Judging from the loose buttons on it, that might not be too far down the road. |
So, with everything connected, a friend showed me how to get power directly from the fuse box, and we turned it on. Sweet music! Tapes played, and we were able to tune in the oldies station on FM. Hey, who needs memory buttons, as long as you can get one good station? The speakers were able to broadcast loud and fairly clear, even over my loud engine. I was singing along to the radio all the way home.
So, that whole project only took two days. Probably could have done it in one if I hadn't had to go to a friends house to figure out how to get power to the thing. I highly recommend doing your own stereo, it's not as scary as it looks. Now I just need to add more speakers in the doors and dash, maybe an amp, and a hidden cd changer... Oh yeah, that money thing. Well, I'm happy just to be cruisin' down the road to Mustang Sally again. Someday I'll get one of those kickin' fancy systems, but until then, this will do.
Now, I need to go find the short that's blowing that fuse and keeping my interior lights from working. THIS could take a few days...
Stefrobrts@stephanies-mustang.com
