Making Hapy Sounds (part 4-ish)

Well.. it is sort of part 4. In the other 3 parts, I made stereo choices, installed the front speakers and the head unit. The rear speakers were popped into 6x9 boxes and allowed to float around. Today, I harden those wires a little bit.

Why Harden the Rear Speakers First?
That's a great question. The head unit is resting on top of the cardboard that it shipped in. That's the most expensive part of this operation, and it isn't held down at all. Well, I drove to Newberry (La Pine Oregon) and back, as well as a 300 mile round trip from home through Eugene, Florence, Newport and Lincoln City before circling back home again (yes, there are posts on that trip coming). That's over 600 miles all together and the head unit didn't bounce at all. The slap-together wiring of the rear speakers, however, came apart plenty. So, that needs to be first.

Clean Up
I explained that I ran the speaker wires through the same hole in the partition as a bunch of other wire bundles. Well, many of those bundles aren't used anymore. For example, there was a 3-wire cable for the heater fan. I yanked the heater fan circuit to reduce the load up front, to prevent another ignition failure. So, that cable was no longer used. I removed it. To get rid of all of it, I needed to remove the side panel along the outer skin that runs from the driver partition to the fridge/storage cabinet. This opened up a means of burying the speaker wires.

Wire It Up
I took the speaker wires I had flopping around, and routed them behind that side panel. Just past the mid-point of the fridge/storage cabinet, I spliced in a pigtail, and more speaker cable. The pigtail is just like the pigtails I put into Oliver's (the '78 MGB) trunk. I had corresponding pigtails added to short runs of speaker cable that ran into the speaker boxes. I extended speaker cables (for both left and right) behind the rock-n-roll bed to the far passenger side, terminating with another set of pigtails. This created a means of plugging in speakers either at the fridge/storage cabinet or at the slider.

I will create a couple extension cables so we can run speakers out into the camp zone, or at least outside the slider.

While this was a brief post, this took me most of a day to do. Burying wires, and making solid connections isn't exactly fast work. The result, though, is pretty neat. 2 pigtails appear just above the cabinet, the left with a strip of yellow around it; the right with a strip of orange, so I know which channel I am plugging into. Next to the slider, there are now 2 matching pigtails (yellow/orange) and the 12V socket (repaired to work again).

I did not run any speaker wires to support a sub-woofer. I figured that if I get ambitious enough to add that and the amplifier to the mix, it will be a complete effort of it's own.

That's it for today. Thanks as always for following along.