Wiring has been a total craze! We wanted to hit this milestone to get the radio setup and working. This would verify that the bundle of wires run to the trunk area are setup properly and working well.
Wiring is a daunting process for many. Some folks love it, some folks hate it, I’m somewhat in-between. The Ron Francis wire harness instructions, it’s ‘good’ but not ‘great’ – sometimes you’ll see instructions like this below:
The wiring harness is labelled quite well, but digging through the cabling can be fun, to say the least. My son and I searched for about 10 minutes to find that the wires we were looking for were dangling into the engine bay as to not ‘get in our way’ while we were sorting lines.
If you choose to add ‘things’ that aren’t part of the standard kit, you’re on your own! There are no directions, but the forums are a goldmine of ‘those who have been in your shoes before!’. Adding a radio isn’t generally a ‘hard’ thing to do in a vehicle. It’s done everyday, usually starting with teens in their first car, remember those days? But when you have to build from scratch, meaning you have to run all the power wires, fuses, safety mechanisms and create your own wire runs – you really have to think/plan for the end result.
Here’s a short video of the setup, obviously it’s not all put together – but a functionality test nonetheless! We were absolutely STOKED that everything worked on the first try!
I chose the Alpine ILX-W650 because of it’s shallow mount capability, plus it has Apple CarPlay and I plan on using the screen for mapping, music, etc. As you can hear in the video, the system puts out some excellent sound, and plenty loud enough. Thanks for reading, and hope you’re enjoying the build – even though it’s been slow lately…
