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[Jay w]

seeing as how we have a few people who have been asking, and seeing as i started mine toninght i though i would pake some piccys and make some notes.

My plan os to fit an alpine amp in place of my bose, in addition to wire up an second amp that will run twox12 subs, i am not after all out power, merely a nicer sounding system that covers a greater range than currently.

First this was to route to power cable through to the back of the car, i have chosen 8 guage cable to do this.

underbonnet first, find a location for the inline 50amp fuse that will be used for the amps:
the fusebox seemed a pretty good place, it's dry and descreet

top off and then pull out the ECU as the fuse will be screwed to this

once i hade marked the backplpate and drilled it

It was a cast of threading the wire from the battery and another wire off to the rear of the car, this is the box with the fuse installed, the holes for the wire to thread through were already there

the put the top back on, make sure everything was in place and then time to move on to the bulkhead.

Hillper had kindly advised me of two routes, one was a grommet by the pollen filter, this one was supposed to be the more difficult of the two, the other was a case of running the cable under the scuttle and across to the drivers side of the bulkhead where there is an unused grommet that is easier to use (auto facelifts, not sure about any of the others)
I choce the harder route ( i like a challenge at times, it was made harder by virtue of the face the airbag gets in the way and the generally isn't a lot of space up behind the dash, so i cheated, i removed the passenger vent, it gave me better access to the correct part of the bulkhead.
When you lift the scuttle and look to the side of the pollen filter housing you will see two big grommets, i went for the lower of the two, this mean thatt he cable came through at an easier height to get at

that was the hardest part over, the remainder took me about 15 mins to do.
Next step is to remove the treadplates along the length of the car and also the reat seat bolster, all of this is so the cable can be threaded through the car

Once youi have removed the covers you will see 4 torx screw in the front and 2 in the rear as well as 1 on the B pillar, to get the covers off you need a flat ended screwdriver to prise them up

the rear bolster is simple, unclip the lower section of the seat, look at the bottom of the bolster and you will see a body coloured tongue, pull it back and slide the bolster out, this will give you access to the wiring loom as it goes into the boot area


then it is a case of fitting it all back together.

one thing to remember, until the power lead is wired into the amp do not connect it to the battery or install the fuse.

More to follow tomorrow

Thanks for Hillper, Laidback and sounds2K for help so far [smiley=thumbsup.gif]

[Jay w]

today i got on with the amp itself, i knew where it was going and last night i had a quick look to see if there were going to be any issues that were glaringing obvious.

First job was to strip out the rear shelf and blind assembly, i have done a how to on the in the past so i won't repeat myself here.
once that's out you are left with this, the screws to undo the bose tray have been circled


Once they are undone you then have 2 clip near the back window, unclip them and the tray will drop down, it may be worth having someone there to grab it
Into the boot and this is what you will be presented with....a Bose amp in a tray....


The blue connector does everything, inputs, outputs, power, ground and remote




The wiring goes something like this
Red - power
brown - earth
red/white - remote

you then have 4 wires, all of them black, they are the inputs, when you strip them back you will find a shield wire, positive and negative speaker cable, the colours of thew wires will correspond with the colors of the wires going back to the speakers

you then have
2 white/brown
2 white            NSR door and parcel shelf speaker

2 green/brown
2 green           OSR door and parcel shelf speakers

1 yellow/brown
1 yellow           OSF door speakers

1 blue/brown
1 blue           NSF door speakers

with the tray out and the blue multiplug cut away from the loom the next job was to cut the tray as the Alpine is a little bit bigger than the tray


A couple of dremel bits later and this is the end result, we had to take out the middle pillar as the amp will be sat right on top of it



from here it was plain sailing, connect up the power feed i had threaded yesterday, find a suitable earth point, connect up the phono leads and speaker connectors and away we go

As you can see the Alpine is a 'little' bigger than the tray, but it fits in there ok....


and in place , all bolted up.....



from here it was a case of fitting it all back together and making sure it all ran fine

the sound is brilliant, a lot richer than the bose amp, although i my have to turn the hi pass filter off as it does get a bit too bassey through the standard speakers.

Next step will be the subs and corresponding amp, that will not take any time at all now as all the donkey work has been done on that, just plug and play