trombe
07-12-2006, 08:51 PM
Recovering From Errors, or What I Learned This Week:
Keep in mind that coming home last night at 10:00pm it was 92 degrees. It's been HOT during the day. I'm working on installing an amp to my stock HU. I've never done this type of thing before, but there are GREAT resources here (like Outpost4's Mike's Mod, which is basically what I'm doing).
Did I mention that it's HOT and with HIGH humidity I'm pretty much soaked and miserable within a minute or two. At any rate, keep that in mind, because I'm using that as my excuse....
OK. now I've got the stock HU out and I'm going to solder female RCA connectors to the front L and R wires. I'm supposed to cut them and leave a long pigtail, so I do. We (my wife is chief assistant, or sometimes I'm the chief assistant) soldered the RCA connectors on, ran the long RCA cables, were tying them down when I started thinking about our great solder job (a newly acquired skill) and how well we'd done. Then I started thinking about signal path (did I mention it was VERY HOT??) and dropped my tools and walked away. My wife asked what was wrong. I said to think about the signal path of what we had just done.
We'd cut the wire AT the plug, leaving a LONG pigtail to the wiring harness and soldered the RCA connector to the harness. Gee, it won't get any signal from the HU that way!!!! Of course I cut ALL the wires that way, including from the subwoofer plug. (I think it was heat exhaustion....)
Plan A -- get a Metra plug, cut the rest of the wires and solder all of them back together.
Plan B -- take the tiny little bit still sticking out from the plug and solder wire to that and then go buy new RCA connectors and try again.
Problem with Plan A is I don't think there's a replacement plug for the sub available, so we went with Plan B. We added some heat shrink stuff over the solder and I think we (here I wasn't even an assisant) got it back together.
It was MY idea to solder on the RCA connector inside in the air conditioning and THEN try the solder to the tiny wire coming out from the plug. This seemed nice in theory, but I learned you should always solder from one end to the other end and don't leave the middle to last. With the tiny wire from the plug and the RCA already soldered to the other wire, it wasn't possible to twist them together before soldering. But I believe my wife's newly acquired soldering skill got it done.
As a musician I know every performance has mistakes. It's recovering from them and not letting the audience know that often saves the day (if you're in an ensemble and make a big mistake, look quickly to the person beside you and then the conductor thinks it was the other person...). I guess installing this stuff is the same way. Pretty bad screw-ups, but at the end of the day it should work just fine.
p.s. and since we had the heat shrink stuff, it worked great using it over the center terminal on the inside of the RCA plug, covering up the solder joint and wire so nothing internal can short out. (I guess that's the 3rd thing I learned this week.)
Keep in mind that coming home last night at 10:00pm it was 92 degrees. It's been HOT during the day. I'm working on installing an amp to my stock HU. I've never done this type of thing before, but there are GREAT resources here (like Outpost4's Mike's Mod, which is basically what I'm doing).
Did I mention that it's HOT and with HIGH humidity I'm pretty much soaked and miserable within a minute or two. At any rate, keep that in mind, because I'm using that as my excuse....
OK. now I've got the stock HU out and I'm going to solder female RCA connectors to the front L and R wires. I'm supposed to cut them and leave a long pigtail, so I do. We (my wife is chief assistant, or sometimes I'm the chief assistant) soldered the RCA connectors on, ran the long RCA cables, were tying them down when I started thinking about our great solder job (a newly acquired skill) and how well we'd done. Then I started thinking about signal path (did I mention it was VERY HOT??) and dropped my tools and walked away. My wife asked what was wrong. I said to think about the signal path of what we had just done.
We'd cut the wire AT the plug, leaving a LONG pigtail to the wiring harness and soldered the RCA connector to the harness. Gee, it won't get any signal from the HU that way!!!! Of course I cut ALL the wires that way, including from the subwoofer plug. (I think it was heat exhaustion....)
Plan A -- get a Metra plug, cut the rest of the wires and solder all of them back together.
Plan B -- take the tiny little bit still sticking out from the plug and solder wire to that and then go buy new RCA connectors and try again.
Problem with Plan A is I don't think there's a replacement plug for the sub available, so we went with Plan B. We added some heat shrink stuff over the solder and I think we (here I wasn't even an assisant) got it back together.
It was MY idea to solder on the RCA connector inside in the air conditioning and THEN try the solder to the tiny wire coming out from the plug. This seemed nice in theory, but I learned you should always solder from one end to the other end and don't leave the middle to last. With the tiny wire from the plug and the RCA already soldered to the other wire, it wasn't possible to twist them together before soldering. But I believe my wife's newly acquired soldering skill got it done.
As a musician I know every performance has mistakes. It's recovering from them and not letting the audience know that often saves the day (if you're in an ensemble and make a big mistake, look quickly to the person beside you and then the conductor thinks it was the other person...). I guess installing this stuff is the same way. Pretty bad screw-ups, but at the end of the day it should work just fine.
p.s. and since we had the heat shrink stuff, it worked great using it over the center terminal on the inside of the RCA plug, covering up the solder joint and wire so nothing internal can short out. (I guess that's the 3rd thing I learned this week.)