When this car was built in the early nineties, the original builder built a tragic light weapon, it was nearly ālit fuseā un drivable (the owner before me dropped the stallie from 3500 to 2500, and swapped the pumpkin from 3.9 to 3.5, I put a smaller carb on- which I am thinking of reversing) . A stereo was an afterthought.
It had a single DIN 90ās Pioneer head unit , and two six inch speakers under the seat (literally) un baffled or boxed.
And sounded terrible! I am not in a position financially to do a stereo install. But I managed to rescue gear from when my 1989 Suzuki Vitara ( Sidekick in the US) was written off. I was using that thing on the farm, and it was fun enough to drive around inā¦ so I bought a cheap android head unit, and for a laugh, a couple of active subwoofers.
When I got rear ended in it (and yes, it hurts when a Ute hits a Sidekick) insurance let me travel to the impound and pull the stereo.
The car had minimal wiring, antenna, power, Accessories and earth to HU and four speaker wires (rear to boot but never connected). I spliced in an ISO connector wiring loom whilst I have the dash out room. And ran microphone (for hands free/ CarPlay) and GPS cables.
I fished pos and negative amp power through the firewall having removed the cluster, (this was something I could not do without cluster out) I also put in an amp trigger and fished both down the door jamb and through the sill. The amps both had speaker line level inputs on computer style connectors, so I fabricated some splitting pig tails.
I turned the system on, and the line level inputs sounded horribleā¦ so I back-fished through a set of RCA and removed the pig tails.
My lower console was fully butchered, I have not cut any further, so please donāt hate on me. Also, yes I know all of it is cheap, and not worthy of the car. The important thing is the pre wiring, it sounds much much better than before (with door speakers to come) I have full CarPlay, back up satnav, hands free calling (which may be full shouting due to how loud the v8 is!).
In future, a couple of door speakers to be worked out, and when I can afford it , swap head unit and subs for better.
I was working on the cluster at the same time, so I had to go back and make it more aqua, to match the LED!
I wanted to give the GPS antenna its best chance, so I taped it above the unconnected air registers. That would have it shielded by the front center (unconnected) speaker, so I pulled that out . I thought if it was original someone might want it (free to good home)ā¦ but it is a fragile weathered paper coned $hite thingā¦ kinda dodged up crap looking, unlikely to be oem.
