A Little Overwhelmed Researching Stereo Upgrades

[Jonathan]

Thank you all for the good feedback. I've purchased a nice modern head unit and speakers that I'm in the process of installing. New wires are being run to each speaker. I'm to the scary part:mating the new to the old. I unplugged my Craig radio and am left with a plug with a bunch of black and white wires, a purple, and a green. After researching, it seems as though I need to retain three of these wires for my install: purple(constant hot), green(acc), and black(ground). The rest seem to be the speaker wires. My question to those who have done this: is my assessment of these remaining wires correct? Also, how would you suggest I mate to the factory harness? Cut the old plug off and solder the new connector(which plugs directly into the rear of my new stereo) into the appropriate stock wires?

If the Craig has come out, so too can the original connector. You mentioned running new speaker wires, so those are already new and not connected to the Craig plug.

In the car, you are left with the purple, green and black wires as you've mentioned. The install is pretty simple from here.

Whichever new stereo head unit you went with, it will come with it's own plug connector. The plastic end plugs into the back of the deck and the other end is a bunch of different wires. You'll need your new stereo instructions/wiring diagram to identify which is which, but this is what it will basically be:

You connect everything you have of the car wiring to those individual new plug wires. I did mine in the passenger footwell where I gave myself some extra length/slack and soldered each one for a good connection.

The fours speakers are easy and you connect the +ve and -ve for each of the four locations (front left and right, rear left and right).

The always on power wire would connect to the one on the stereo plug indicating it's to save settings, memory, etc. It doesn't power your unit when running, only when the car is off.

The switched power wire is the one you connect to run the stereo and it comes on when you turn the key.

The deck likely has a ground wire coming off of it. What you want to do is connect that stereo ground to the one coming from the fuse/relay area (the original one) and also have it terminate together with the other centre console grounds. This is what the screw on the lower right hand corner of the radio bracket is for. It in itself is not the ground, but when you tie it together with the one from the rear, it becomes the ground.

The new stereo will also have an antenna cable/plug. I have a front fender antenna so this was easy and I just plugged it in. If you have the rear power antenna, you might be hooking up a couple extra wires.

I also had an iPod cable which was just one end plugged directly into the back of the deck, and the other end routed up and under into the glovebox. Easy peasy.

As for fuses, I got rid of any remaining inline glass fuses on that factory wiring up front. The powered wires are still coming from the original fuse box and that fuse remained. The new deck has a micro fuse for additional/redundant protection.

Ask any other questions if you have them. I wrote a how-to on my install somewhere on here, not sure if it was in it's own thread or together with a how to remove centre console one.

EDIT: This is one of the threads I was mentioning:

http://dmctalk.org/showthread.php?76...adio-faceplate

And this is the other:

http://dmctalk.org/showthread.php?72...onsole+removal