Does the basic radio have rear speaker outputs?

Guard Dad

It's the end of long hot day without a lot to show for it. I goth the illuminated door sills in and they look great. The GTR red starter button is in, it's cool. The head unit and adjacent trims are on the work bench. The ipod interface cable isn't working, Crutchfield says it ought to work, they have a call into the factory-I may get a call on Tuesday. I have, with your help, finally decided on the cabling layout for the speakers. The crossover will be mounted in the door (does the interior of the door see much water when it rains, do I need to put the crossover in a baggie?) I'll be using the factory woofer cable to feed the crossover with a short cable within the door to the woofer and longer cable from the crossover along the door's main wiring harness into the kick panel and then to the tweeter. Running the new tweeter wires through rubber conduit linking the door to the kick panel would be my first choice but it looks tricky, can it be easily done or is the preferred choice to run the tweeter wires along the outside of the rubber conduit I like to take my time on this stuff, I like a clean installation. I was able to install the passenger side tweeter and woofer and Dynamat the door too. The car is immobile and the garage is a mess and I won't be able to do much more on it before Monday.

Juleous

Sounds like your really given er on the mods nice work, why put the crossover inside the door? Put it in the kick panels down low in the foot well, no matter how you do it you have to run one wire through the door, if you put the crossover in the door then you will have two wires going through the door. One for the tweeter one from the amp, install the crossover in the kickpanel and pull the woofer wire through the door then your done.

I thought you were keeping the factory HU? Oops must have missed that part. Nice to see someone taking on their own car, it's really not that hard when you have a resource like the people on this forum.

Guard Dad

Yea, I'm using the stock head unit, no external amp for now, maybe never even. Your suggestion has merit, doing it your way I would use the factory tweeter cable to feed the crossover and then run the cables from the crossover to the speakers. Your way might be better than mine actually.

My first audio mod was to add a rear speaker to my dad's 65 Mustang's AM radio. Later I added a reverb to the rear speaker, in 1966 that was a hot system! It was another couple of years before I could afford to add a Muntz 4 track tape deck with front and rear stereo speakers. Never did get FM on that car. You ever seen a wiring harness on a stock 65 Mustang? Nothing to it! The Z's doors have more technology in them than that entire Mustang had. The stock (transistor!) radio had an antenna lead, a single hot power lead (chassis ground) and two wires to the speaker, now that was a system in May 1964 (most new cards did not come with any radio standard and just an few years earlier tube radios were the norm) when he purchased the car new. You probably figured out by now that I'm a lot older than most of the folks on this forum. Still love cars though.

Juleous

I would not want to install any electronics inside a door, now you have to take your door apart again to get to it should you need to service anything. Recommend using new speaker wire if possible, or not up to you if you keep the same wire no door mods at all if you do. Just pick up the tweeter wire and woofer wire into the crossover, then from the deck to the amp input on the crossover. The factory deck will put out very little power, you may still want that amp to drive your new components.

Guard Dad

Ok. I did not put the crossover in the door, it's going in the kick panel to avoid water and for easier future access. I've got family stuff for the rest of the day so the crossover is on the floor for now. Now that I've done one door I expect the other to go a lot faster tomorrow. I gave the new speakers a quick test and the difference is significant. The missing low bass is now back, the boomy mid bass is gone and the high end is brighter. This has been a pain but it is going to be worth it. The system is more than adequate for my purposes but not even a starting point for a heavy metal fan.

I did have a problem identifying the positive speaker lead on the door speaker factory cable (I used this as my source cable). I got what appeared to be identical positive voltage (using a digital volt meter) on both leads when testing to ground. The system is above ground so I would normally expect to see one lead testing positive and one negative. How do you folks normally identify the positive and negative leads? I am trying to avoid phasing issues between the right and left channels.

Juleous

Actually the output to a speaker has an alternating sign wave from peak positive to peak negative this indicates A/C power so your meter would need to be on A/C to check amp outputs to speakers. The reason your reading the same on both leads is your only reading the positive part of the sign wave, when your meter is on DC voltage. So this won't help you figuring your positive amp output from your negative, unless you have a oscilloscope handy?

Your best option is identify the factory speaker terminals and match them up to the correct wire color. If you can not find a wire harness color code.