Monday, December 3, 2012

Time to fix the stereo

Greetings gentle readers. It's been some time. And that means we've been out enjoying Kurt, instead of spending quite so much time fixing him. And that's a good thing. Here's our Thanksgiving:


All the same, there's still a long list of things to fix. One is the stereo. Once, when I was driving to work on a rainy fall day, the stereo quit. The head unit still had power, but nothing from the speakers. Nada, kaput. This  meant a short somewhere in the speaker wires.

I started with the wiring with the head unit. Here's how it looked when I started:



Again, those blasted twist connectors everywhere. I counted nine of the damned things. When I tugged on the speaker wire in the driver-side door, the driver door speakers dropped sound completely, even though I'd redone their wiring too. (No pix of that job, sorry. I need to do the passenger door too, and I'll show you what a mess it was.) So, I decided to solder all of these, instead of leaving all these twist connectors in place.

Preparing to tin two wires, prior to splicing them:


And the head unit wiring, upon completion:



I could probably tidy more, e.g. replacing those crimp-on splices with soldered ones, and zip-tying the wires a bit more, but I'll take it. And tugging on the door wires no longer leads to fade-outs.