I’ve decided to install a modern stereo in my car so I can listen to some Floyd instead of just am news. I’m leaving my philco in place and mounting my stereo in my glove box. Problem I have is wiring the amp in the trunk. I have to run the power wire from the battery to the trunk. I don’t want the bright blue cable and huge fuse running through my engine bay. Has anyone run this cable and had it tucked away?
I noticed a hole next to the battery that leads to the fender well. I can probably mount it in there, but how can I get the cable inside the car to the door sills without removing the fender for installation ?
Have you thought about insulating the wire, or putting it in some type of conduit to protect it from elements and road debris and tucking it along the frame then back up into the trunk?
Insulating the wire is a good idea. We use a lot of stealth wiring methods in our Fire truck command vehicles so they maintain a stock appearance. Most of our add on’s are using 8 gauge wire and relay points.
Steven
The BOSS 429 had its battery mounted in the trunk. The cable ran under the passenger side sill plate but came through the firewall above the heater core. If you ran from the battery through the inner fender and re-entered the passenger compartment where the antenna comes thorugh at the “A” pillar you could minimize the amount of the cable that is exposed.
And I’m sure you already know this but make sure that you utilize a grommet anytime you run a cable through a metal hole.
Installed many an amp in many a car. Number one: How big is the amp? What is the actual power requirement? The reason for the big wire in most cases is because of the demand that bass and sub bass put on an amp. The bigger the power wire, the less likely that heat will generate from heat due to resistance and therefore the less likely the need for a fuse. The reason for the fuse is demand increases & heat gets generated due to resistance from the wire not being able to handle the demand, the fuse blows and all is well everything cools you replace fuse and repeat the cycle. Most amps also have fused protection. If you aren’t running everything so hard that it gets to egg frying temps it isn’t absolutely necessary, but a good idea for worst case scenario (like keeping your beautiful car from burning to the ground because you just HAD to listen to the cannon blasts on For Those About To Rock at 4,000 db and got evrything so red hot that the point of no return was tossed out your window like a PBR back in '82).
If you aren’t running 15" subs and boosting those frequencies to make them shake your car apart, then you shouldn’t need a giant power wire. If you are running 6bys in the rear, door speakers or possibly a stereo dash speaker along with front and rear full range speakers you shouldn’t need a battery cable sized power wire.
You SHOULD be able to run it under the sill plate. I have went as far as going under the carpet, but was using a HUGE power feed going to a power array that had three smaller power wires feeding each amp. Fosgate punch 45, punch 75, and power 300 (? been a while but it was a big one powering two blue thunder 12s in a 7th order box). Keep in mind this was powering a center channel, two midbass and tweeters up front, and two mid bass and tweeters in rear along with the subs. Also ran a circuit breaker instead of fuses. All of this was overkill and along with years of guitar amps right behind me helped to contribute to my crappy hearing now.
If it were me, I would make it easy on myself and use one of the digital units that looks like the factory radio when it’s off. They have enough power to run decent full range speakers without destroying them (distortion from lack of power blows speakers faster than too much power), and will chase you out of the car before they even hint at distorting as long as you aren’t trying to get sub bass frequencies out of those smaller speakers. They won’t accurately reproduce them anyhow. They are too small and 6x9s track low frequencies terribly due to the oblong shape. Use round speakers whenever possible.
Anyow, that is the resident musician/recording engineer’s public service announcement on sound. I hope nobody took some of my attempts at humor as being a d$#@%#bag on purpose.
Well, all that talk of amps, wires, speakers, bass, midbass, power arrays, etc., some of that sounds like Russian to me. The radio in our car does not work and every time we have taken the car out for a spin, the sound of the throaty V8 is music to our ears!
A little more info. Running the amp bridged, it’s going to be putting out 625 watts RMS. I’m installing just 1 12 inch sub in a sealed box which is only rated for 300 watts, so I’ll have the gain on the amp turned way down. I believe the amp kit is 8 guage, nothing huge, injustice don’t want to see it in my engine bay at all
70B302Cat described the best routing for hidden wires. You can pick up power at the battery terminal and then run the power wire through the inner fender next to the battery. Alternatively you could also hook up at the battery side of the solenoid and then make a small hole through the inner fender behind the post. The fuse in the power lead is there to protect the wire not the amp. If the wire gets pinched and shorted to ground the fuse will keep it from turning red hot and possibly burning the car to the ground. Eight gauge is fine for what you are doing. You can get stranded 8 gauge wire in lots of colors and in more normal insulation thickness.
All of that stuff combined with my younger teenage self helped contribute to bad hearing now, so I am in agreement with you. My radio doesn’t work and I don’t care. I would rather listen to my smallblock climb through the gears. The sound at 70 is music to my ears as well. A killer stereo would take away from it for me. I may do a head unit for traffic updates and handsfree bluetooth talking, but again, not being able to hear the phone helps keep my cat what it is, an ESCAPE from being constantly connected, or more accurately chained to, technology.
I kind of like that I can’t be reached when I’m driving my '68.