Driving Betty without tunes is now a thing of the past. I broke down and bought a radio and new speakers from Crutchfield.com this week. I’m pretty happy with my purchase, I bought a cheap receiver, but it does have a USB port that will be very handy for listening to podcasts on the commute to and from work. I bought it all from Crutchfield because they offered a free vehicle-specific wiring harness. Lots of wires to connect.
I couldn’t use the harness as hoped, I even had to run new power wires. This wasn’t too hard, since I already added a new fuse block for the WVO project.
Of course Bryson “helped” me throughout the whole event. I gave him a stool to stand on so he could watch me connect the wires under the hood. After I was done, he started adding new components to the engine bay. A spool of wire, a toy helicopter, a stick, and a pair of pliers were later pulled out of there. I hope I got everything!
Bryson spent a good deal of time dragging around various lengths and spools of wire, and “connecting things up”. He wired up my wheels, the trash can, he dump truck toy, and probably many other things that I didn’t even see.
The English translation of the wiring diagram was not clear, so I decided to take advantage of Crutchfield’s free tech support. I called 5 times and got a busy signal every time. I wound up just figuring it out by trial and error.
I was disappointed that I couldn’t reuse the factory speaker grills in the back. I had to use the “look and see if you want to steal these” grills that came with the speakers, and they look so out of place in this car. The rear speakers were advertised as “drop in replacements” but they really were not. I had to remove the factory baffles to make them fit.
The front speakers were even more work, but I knew they would be. I had to use the Dremel tool to cut away strategic areas of the dashboard, and mount the speakers under the dash instead of on top. I also wound up breaking both of my air vents in the process. Those factory speakers are very shallow, and for a good reason, there just isn’t any room for standard speakers, but I did make them fit, with the factory grills.
Like father like son :):):)