Rollin' in my 5.0
With my rag-top down so my hair can blow
The girlies on standby waving just to say hi
Did you stop no I just drove by
Kept on pursuing to the next stop
I busted a left and I'm heading to the next block
The block was dead
Yo so I continued to A1A Beachfront Avenue
Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis
Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis
Jealous 'cause I'm out getting mine
Shay with a guage and Vanilla with a nine
So my bludz and bredrinz I have bin whackin aht the ill jamz on my Cortina AM radio fo da lass timez mudda.
I haz INSTALL.
first job was to pull the Grundig radio cassette from the Mazda because that had lost its code when I had a new heater matrix fitted. Sod doing that myself, looked far too tricky. And it was. Anyway I had a nice Alpine headunit in the attic whihc had been in a couple of Ems other cars so I got a Mazda-ISO adapter from Halfords and whacked that in.
Kind of a shame its bright silver, but hey. Sounds great. If anyone wants to make a small cash offer for the old unit you're welcome to, you'll need to be able to decode it though.
Its a pull-out type one.
And what is it with Halfords staff being so helpful? I ask "this adaptor is just labelled "mazda not 323" will it be OK for a 1992 626?" and the kid says "dunno". Not "I'll just check in the application book" or "I'll ask a grown up". Just "dunno". Nice.
I was also after a set of 6.5" coaxes for the front of the Cortina but the range on offer even in the Ripspeed "Super Centre" was appauling. Like no suitable speakers at all. How ghey. In fact since its been "remodelled" our Halfords "Supercentre" seems to have about 30% floor area and a lot less stock.
OK shop online and all that but when you need speakers on a saturday morning you don;t have the time to balls about online and for a £40-£50 set of spekers the P&P makes it uneconomical compared to shopping in, erm, a shop. Except Halfords offer like no choice now. Unless you want pink tacky tat interiror "dress up" for your Ford Ka. Someone better wake up and smell the ASP.NET dude.
So I hit up a local car audio specialist for speakers and got what I needed at £10 off their retail price which was kinda cool fo shizzle ma bizzle to the drizzlie in the wizzle. True players will know what side of the street I have my butter. I and ain't talking no low-phat spread.
So lets get stated. Mazda took 2 minutes, Cortina took 2 days...
Nice original uncut dash and door cards. Luckily I have a set of spares
And a selection of pods and stuff to help mount the speakers properly
and my trusty JVC head unit. Its a well nice bit of kit has been in a couple of my cars now.
The previous owner had a stereo in there and told me that all the wiring was in place.
He lied...
There were a few bits of wire I could not identify and some wire hacked into the heater feed which the AM radio had been using and other than that nothing. So I basically had to start from scratch.
I'm going to say always use on of these
Univeral ISO harness. Rather than chopping in to the HU wiring and bulletting or chocky blocking it into the wiring in the car, these harness kits make your life so much easier. Especially if you have to remove the unit for any reason or upgrade it later. Plug & play kiddos. Don't hate the player hate the umpire.
Eventually got the unit mounted and wired. I was a good lad and went back to the fuse box to pick up feed for permenant and igniton lives rather than breaching some other wiring in the car. This meant spending quite a lot of time contorted upside down trying to feed wires through bulkhead grommets (More cheese grommet?) and the like but once you have the first one through you can tape the others to it and pull them through.
This is when I discover one of my fuses is actually a screwed up bit of tin foil. Nice.
Then we can hit up the doors with sound styles.
Notice the door is nicely deadened with Dynamat to kill vibration and keep the sound in the car.
cut door card goes on
mounted up an angled pod trimmed in black vinyl which should positon the speaker just nice
Speakers are fairly hefty jobbies.
then do same for driver's side
Of course there was much essing about with connectors to get them sorted and I really hate trying to do crimp connectors, but meh.
Clip on the head unit face panel and....
....silence!
No power to the HU at all. So I pull everythign a part again and try and find if I have a bad earth (my #1 cause of electrical probelms) but no, I have no power at all. I ceck at the fuse box and theres no power on the outlet. Odd, it should be live all the time as its the circuit for the sidelights and dash illumination. Out of curiosity I flick the sidelights on and - guess what - the stereo comes on...
crapolla. After all that effort re-checking it was the frikken feed. Every other car I ever worked on has those permentant lives permentant live even with the circuit is off. Well, now I know.
So I simply swap the permentnant live feed to a circuit for the clock and courtesy light and guess what, all operates exactly how it should.
Word to the wise - if you are cleanig up the spade outlets on a fuse box with a wire brush - with metal wire bristles - disconnect the battery or remove the fuses... Mmmm Sparky!
I also have one chanel playing only. So I muck about with the HU settings but no joy. So I pull apart all my wiring on the passenger side and redo the lot. No different. Only then do I think to get another speaker to test the wiring - which checks out just fine. Dead speaker! So once I swapped that at the supplier and fitted it all sounds great. Hurray!
and a couple of moody / misty car park shots to round us off with
Yay.
With my rag-top down so my hair can blow
The girlies on standby waving just to say hi
Did you stop no I just drove by
Kept on pursuing to the next stop
I busted a left and I'm heading to the next block
The block was dead
Yo so I continued to A1A Beachfront Avenue
Girls were hot wearing less than bikinis
Rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis
Jealous 'cause I'm out getting mine
Shay with a guage and Vanilla with a nine
So my bludz and bredrinz I have bin whackin aht the ill jamz on my Cortina AM radio fo da lass timez mudda.
I haz INSTALL.
first job was to pull the Grundig radio cassette from the Mazda because that had lost its code when I had a new heater matrix fitted. Sod doing that myself, looked far too tricky. And it was. Anyway I had a nice Alpine headunit in the attic whihc had been in a couple of Ems other cars so I got a Mazda-ISO adapter from Halfords and whacked that in.
Kind of a shame its bright silver, but hey. Sounds great. If anyone wants to make a small cash offer for the old unit you're welcome to, you'll need to be able to decode it though.
Its a pull-out type one.
And what is it with Halfords staff being so helpful? I ask "this adaptor is just labelled "mazda not 323" will it be OK for a 1992 626?" and the kid says "dunno". Not "I'll just check in the application book" or "I'll ask a grown up". Just "dunno". Nice.
I was also after a set of 6.5" coaxes for the front of the Cortina but the range on offer even in the Ripspeed "Super Centre" was appauling. Like no suitable speakers at all. How ghey. In fact since its been "remodelled" our Halfords "Supercentre" seems to have about 30% floor area and a lot less stock.
OK shop online and all that but when you need speakers on a saturday morning you don;t have the time to balls about online and for a £40-£50 set of spekers the P&P makes it uneconomical compared to shopping in, erm, a shop. Except Halfords offer like no choice now. Unless you want pink tacky tat interiror "dress up" for your Ford Ka. Someone better wake up and smell the ASP.NET dude.
So I hit up a local car audio specialist for speakers and got what I needed at £10 off their retail price which was kinda cool fo shizzle ma bizzle to the drizzlie in the wizzle. True players will know what side of the street I have my butter. I and ain't talking no low-phat spread.
So lets get stated. Mazda took 2 minutes, Cortina took 2 days...
Nice original uncut dash and door cards. Luckily I have a set of spares
And a selection of pods and stuff to help mount the speakers properly
and my trusty JVC head unit. Its a well nice bit of kit has been in a couple of my cars now.
The previous owner had a stereo in there and told me that all the wiring was in place.
He lied...
There were a few bits of wire I could not identify and some wire hacked into the heater feed which the AM radio had been using and other than that nothing. So I basically had to start from scratch.
I'm going to say always use on of these
Univeral ISO harness. Rather than chopping in to the HU wiring and bulletting or chocky blocking it into the wiring in the car, these harness kits make your life so much easier. Especially if you have to remove the unit for any reason or upgrade it later. Plug & play kiddos. Don't hate the player hate the umpire.
Eventually got the unit mounted and wired. I was a good lad and went back to the fuse box to pick up feed for permenant and igniton lives rather than breaching some other wiring in the car. This meant spending quite a lot of time contorted upside down trying to feed wires through bulkhead grommets (More cheese grommet?) and the like but once you have the first one through you can tape the others to it and pull them through.
This is when I discover one of my fuses is actually a screwed up bit of tin foil. Nice.
Then we can hit up the doors with sound styles.
Notice the door is nicely deadened with Dynamat to kill vibration and keep the sound in the car.
cut door card goes on
mounted up an angled pod trimmed in black vinyl which should positon the speaker just nice
Speakers are fairly hefty jobbies.
then do same for driver's side
Of course there was much essing about with connectors to get them sorted and I really hate trying to do crimp connectors, but meh.
Clip on the head unit face panel and....
....silence!
No power to the HU at all. So I pull everythign a part again and try and find if I have a bad earth (my #1 cause of electrical probelms) but no, I have no power at all. I ceck at the fuse box and theres no power on the outlet. Odd, it should be live all the time as its the circuit for the sidelights and dash illumination. Out of curiosity I flick the sidelights on and - guess what - the stereo comes on...
crapolla. After all that effort re-checking it was the frikken feed. Every other car I ever worked on has those permentant lives permentant live even with the circuit is off. Well, now I know.
So I simply swap the permentnant live feed to a circuit for the clock and courtesy light and guess what, all operates exactly how it should.
Word to the wise - if you are cleanig up the spade outlets on a fuse box with a wire brush - with metal wire bristles - disconnect the battery or remove the fuses... Mmmm Sparky!
I also have one chanel playing only. So I muck about with the HU settings but no joy. So I pull apart all my wiring on the passenger side and redo the lot. No different. Only then do I think to get another speaker to test the wiring - which checks out just fine. Dead speaker! So once I swapped that at the supplier and fitted it all sounds great. Hurray!
and a couple of moody / misty car park shots to round us off with
Yay.