Thread: Whats up guys? Finished my car audio installation (finally)

It's been a while, but I finally finished with my car audio installation and am pretty damn pleased with the results. I guess I'll explain what took so long.

Me and my buddy started installing over winter break and pretty much finished everything but it didn't work and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why. Anyhow, school started back up and I got real busy and unable to fool around with it. Without testing I thought I had determined the headunit was not putting out sound through the RCAs (should have tested it) and sent back for a new one. I thought this because I hooked the RCAs to an ipod and it played music but when hooked to the headunit nothing (or atleast nothing audible over the stock speakers which I left temporarily hooked up).

Anyhow, we finally determined this past week, the turn on wire somehow was not powering the amps enough. We powered it directly off the 12v source and found it worked and then we decided to reroute it to the accessory power wire (which is fine because somehow the accessory plug i tapped off of retained RAP even though I was told I would lose it without the special harness lol).

Everything is working great now and sounding fantastic. My only question is in terms of power usage. I have a 1200 watt amp to my sub and a 300 watt amp to my speakers and I was wondering if my car will be ok with this without any electrical upgrades. All I've done was put a 0 gauge ground from the battery to the chassis because the amp kit I ordered came with the wire to do that. Other than that I haven't upgraded anything. It seems fine so far (minus a slight dimming of headlights [not bad] when heavy bass hits). I have a GXP so my alt is like 120 amps or something (i believe). My battery tends to bounce around from 12.5 to 14.5 volts while driving and playing music (I'm not sure if that tells you much, it pretty much went through the same range before the install). I obviously understand the music drains the electricity much quicker but it seems to be able to handle it ok, I just want to make sure I won't be causing long term damage on my electrical system.

Anyhow, on a brighter note, I will have pics up soon. Me and my friend took quite a few, hopefully I can get them tommorrow. The only thing that will be changing in the future probably is the tweeter locations as I never had a chance to build fiberglass mounts for them and therefore they are kind of roughly drilled (off-axis) into my a-pillars. It still sounds good imo and looks decent, but it could be better and I want to try to put them on-axis eventually.

Originally Posted by BillBoost37

Kinda tough to look up the power requirements etc when you don't tell us what name and model of amps you are running.

sorry about that. i'm running a audioque 1200d at 1 ohm to a fi Q sub and a jl 300/4 bridged to a pair of hertz hsk 165 components.

Here's a random assortment of pics. we took a ton so I'm just pulling out good ones from the photobucket album:

putting the crossover in the door:


Headunit installed (though I have an upgraded model now lol):


Battery to chassis ground:


Running some RCAs along door trim:


Routing the huge ass power wire through the firewall (this was a pain in the ass):


modification to grommet to fit the damn power wire through it:


amps wired up to back of seat (yes i realize its kind of a mess of wires back there lol):


temporary ghetto rigged location for tweeters lol:


and from the back:


finished sub box in trunk:

my friend just getting done sound deadening one door:


me and my friend working on the sub box:


me and a friend putting together sub box:


Here's a pic of my crappy sound deadening. went back over this to make it look better lol. also you can see the slighly ghetto rigged speaker mount. hard to tell from this pic but we had to dremel out a lot of it to make the woofers fit.

with the seat folded up. haha i like this pic.


my car in my buddies garage: