11/14/06

I'm not sure if I'm going to finish the story of Mr. Wiggly's stereo or just say I've got nothing today. I've been running around a little today and I'm quite sleepy. Of course if I don’t tell y'all the rest of the story, what else am I going to do? Ok, I'll finish the story. When last we spoke, I had… ok, now I don’t remember where I left off. I'm going to have to go look right quick. Hang on. Right, now I've got it. I had just released a hostage and was ready to begin the installation. First I had a look at the mounting location for the rear speakers. I didn’t like the original placement, up top next to the back doors, because I had no way to mount them. I looked at a few other spots and I think I'm going to mount the boxes to the tops of the fenders and call it a day. Next I started on the antenna. I took the unibit and hogged out the hole in the fender some and began looking for the hole to pass the antenna wire through. I found none. I took the glove box out thinking it might just be hidden but I still found nothing. I drilled a hole. I threaded the cable through the fender and the hole into the interior then started trying to mount the thing. No luck. You are supposed to be able to fish the thing in and have the clips fall out into place then tighten it down. Well, not at the angle I was working with I couldn’t. I wound up taking the scuttle valance thingy off and reaching in. I got it mounted and positioned and tightened down. I think it will work. Next I spent a long while trying to decide how I was going to power the head unit. I thought about tapping into the wires for the relay powering the dash cluster but moved on. I finally found another relay in the shop and had an idea. It had five spades going into and out of it. Two were the signal and ground pins; I knew what to do with them. One was the switched load pin; I'd hook it to the switched power lead on the radio. The other two were bussed together and fed the switched load pin when activated; I'd hook one to the constant hot and the other to the battery. Easy as pie. I made most of those connections, all but the battery, and went back to the speakers. I played with the boxes for a while, trying to decide how I was going to mount the speakers to them. I also went out and looked for alternate mounting locations. I thought about mounting them under the seats pointing backward using the seat pedestal thingies as enclosures. Marty Smith came by and thought that might work. We’ll see. I'd have to close off the front of the pedestals to make them actual enclosures though. They wouldn’t be sealed by any stretch of the imagination, but they’d at least be enclosed. They might also be a bit tinny sounding enclosed in metal. I don’t know. No, what I think I'll wind up doing is making some aluminum “adapters” for the existing boxes and screw them to the fenders like I said before. The “adapters” would be aluminum faces for the boxes that the speakers mount to since the actual holes in the boxes are too big now. I think if there isn’t too much aluminum hanging over the edge of the holes, which there won’t be, and it is screwed down to the face of the box with plenty of screws, it should work just fine. Besides, it is a thirty-year-old van, not a sound-off competition vehicle. I probably won’t even be able to hear the rear speakers anyway with all the noise the doors and zorst make. We’ll see. Well, that’s really about all I got done over the weekend. I plan to finish it up either Wednesday night or Saturday morning. I know, it was kind of a letdown not having a completed installation to tell y'all about. Live with it. I'm done for the day. Talk to y'all tomorrow.