LOUDENOUGHMUSTANG

Well last week I was driving and I was rocking out to Alice in Chains- Them Bones. I turned the volume up and next thing I hear is a sharp static sound from the door subs. Well come to find out from audioexpress that my door subs are shot. So I take it upon myself to switch out the doro subs to aftermarket ones. My sub of choice was the Kicker CVT8 Shallow mount subs. After having a 1" adaptor made I placed the subs in the doors and used part of the shelby kicker upgrade writeup to figure out how to wire them. It calls for one side of the harness to be used. Used the gray/black strand and taped up the other side. Well the subs sound worse then the stock ones did. Now I am looking at upgrading the factory amp to a 500w aftermarket amp. Now here is where I run into my dilemma. In order to wire up the subs do I need to rip out the factoy wiring and install a 4 gauge wire kit? Will the wire kit even be compatable with the shaker 500 headunit? Is it possible just to wire up the aftermarket amp up with factory wiring from the amp? Any advice would be appreciated.

wayne613

You can pull the input connector where it runs into the amp, tap each for a LOC to run to the AM amp. Then run lines back through the door to the new speakers.

Short answer, yes, in my opinion, once you go past say 125-150w you´d need to bypass the existing speaker lines. 4 gauge is overkill by any stretch for 500w RMS for the speaker lines, so I doubt I would personally go that route, and good luck getting that through that cabling grommet on each side. Yeash.

Someone correct me if I´m wrong, but I think the front subs are only really 80w RMS from those factory amps. In any case if no one responds, a quick search will turn up their actual craptacular values. The factory wiring I think is either 16 or 18 gauge.

But yeah, this won´t be a hookup and done short job.

oldsch00lf00l

IIRC, the chipamp that powers each subwoofer contains a pair of 55x2 (MAX) TDA8566q ICs. The only downside is that each factory amplifier was designed to make max power by driving a pair of 1.2 ohm dual voice coil subwoofers.

I disassembled one of the amps to scavenge the connector for a factory interface. I am thinking about putting it back together just to see what kind of power it does make just prior to clipping as an experiment. Time to raid the spare parts box!

Edit: As for the factory wiring, I think it is 16 gauge. I just used the existing cable and tied into it versus trying to run more through the molex. It is my opinion that an amp is a royal POS if it can't overcome a few feet of smaller gauge speaker wire.

LOUDENOUGHMUSTANG

Thanks for the responses. I just moved into a house so as soon as all the unpacking is done I think I will do this and create a write up. Seems like alot of people ask this question and noone has been able to give them a straight answer. By next week I should have this done.

oldsch00lf00l

Would it be something like this...

Make a ring that is 8.5" in outer diameter and cut the inner diameter to fit your driver:


Driver mounted in ring (note the holes for the factory grill):


Factory Grill:


Replacement woofer in place: