I began the amp and speaker installation today on the X. The basic plan is to use Oe speaker wires from a new Kicker 4 channel amp to drive Kicker two-way speakers in the OE rear door locations and components in the front door and pilar locations. Today was spent pulling the old amp and bracket, removing the rear door panels and speakers, installing the new rear speakers, sorting out the wiring to these rear speakers, and finalizing the amp location and mounting.
I did start with an easy win, a BMW roundel mounted over the Method center cap on my spare:
Then I pulled the left trunk cubby and trunk floor apart to get to the amp bracket and remove it, with the amp. The door cards were a pain, as usual and I'll be off to autozone tomorrow to load up on JB Weld. In a new twist, the right rear door pocket/ash tray came off, along with a number of previously unrepaired plastic brackets. Good times.
The speakers went in easy (I'd previously installed them into ebay enclosures) but I noticed the wire colors on each side were the same (Yellow and Brown). This dashed my cunning plan of simply tracing different colors back to the amp plug and splitting them off to attach to the new amp. Bentley to the rescue. The left rear is yellow and brown all the way to the amp, but the right rear is spliced somewhere and comes out a different color at the amp. Bentley was right on all but one of the front doors, but by that time the only two remaining similar gage wires in the amp plug were easy to spot. I labeled all of them and tested each speaker location with a flashlight battery to ensure I could hear a faint pop from each. This also served to check the polarity at the newly installed rear speakers as I could see them flex outward when the battery was attached to the speaker wires. I am using the factory plugs at the enclosures and bridged those to the speaker connections. End result:
Last up for today was to test mount the amplifier and drill the holes. I bought some rubber washers just to isolate it and keep any rattles, rubbing, etc. down, and will hit the holes I drilled with some primer and paint before the final installation. I left too much RCA cable in the back, but I wasn't sure how I was going to mount it. I know its going to be a stretch in the dash to the head unit, so I'm hopeful I can pull some of the extra from back to front. I may need to remove the front left A pillar to do this.
I'll get the rear door cards glued up tomorrow and pull the front cards to install the two way speakers. I also need to repair the front right airbag as the plug is so worn it backs off and triggers a light in the dash. I may end up pulling one of the rear door airbag plugs since these have never been turned on since we've owned the car.
In theory there isn't much to do in the dash except remove the line output converter and plug in the RCA cables. I also want to tap off the cigarette lighter wiring to make the head unit dim at night. I missed this on the initial install. Last but not least will be to pull the negative terminal on the battery and connect the amp to ground, power and the OE amp trigger. I'll take another swing at a phantom voltage test with my new multimeter and hopefully not brick this one up too.