• Hello Guest, welcome to the initial stages of our new platform!
    You can find some additional information about where we are in the process of migrating the board and setting up our new software here

    Thank you for being a part of our community!

Clusterduck of wires in my dash where a radio should be... Help!

Very easy stuff. This man laid it out for you. Same info should be labeled on your new radio.....

Only three wires needed to make it run!

1. Find an always-hot wire, or run one from the power distribution block under the hood if want to keep it VERY simple.

2. Find the key-on wire. Not that hard. again, if you can't find one, or are too lazy, run one from the fuse box.

3. Ground that ****.

Now, your radio will turn on. Now wire up the 8 wires for the speakers. Again, if you are unable to find the wires for whatever reason I suggest, in your case, that you simply just run fresh speaker wire. OR you could do it right and use the multimeter to trace the circuits, but sounds like you haven't been able to do that.

His guide was very helpful! But here's the thing - my radio didn't turn on, although both wires that should put out voltage did and the ground seemed to work fine and all the wires were fine. I can't for the life of me figure out why that is.
 
So according to this link the switched power should be getting 12V when the car turns on. This is not the case... Which is probably why the radio isn't turning on, lol. Anyone have any idea why that might be? Should I check my fuses? Is there anywhere else that the problem might be?
 
So according to this link the switched power should be getting 12V when the car turns on. This is not the case... Which is probably why the radio isn't turning on, lol. Anyone have any idea why that might be? Should I check my fuses? Is there anywhere else that the problem might be?

Based on something you said about 2.7 volts in an earlier post, I would also leap to that conclusion.

hattrick970.jpg
 
Okay! Well, final update. I got it working!

The reason that I was only getting 2/3 V is because fuse 8 was blown, which is also why my cabin lights and my auto locks weren't working (I thought that it meant my battery was low, lol...). So I went and got some fuses, popped it in, and sha-bam, suddenly we have all the voltage we need and my radio works perfectly!

And as for the orange/white and orange wires... Turns out for some reason they are the front left speaker. The regular white/black and white do not work, and for some reason those are wired to the speaker instead. The gauge is super high, though, so at some point I will definitely have to replace them with real speaker wire. I guess a PO didn't wanna deal with finding the break in the cable and said **** it, I'll just wire something new. So for the time being I just used what was in place, and it works!

Thank you, everyone, for your help!
 
You might not need to do any additional running of wires at all. The stock speaker wiring basically runs left and under/near the steering column into a plug. If that plug is disconnected...bingo! Then you can tear out that terribly thin twisted pair and run the factory wiring. Only way to tell 100% is to take the driver's side under dash off and take a peek. Plug should be a 2 pin above the fuse panel/hood release.

The only reason that I thought that that might be the case is because on the key for the wire colors orange is the dash dimmer. I don't imagine it's a tragedy if I don't hook it up right, but it's still probably good to have.

As far as the dimmer/illumination wires (dimmer is usually orange/white and illumination is solid orange) for your aftermarket radio...they aren't necessary. I've NEVER hooked up a dimmer wire because the car's wiring/voltage ranges never meets with the aftermarket radio's voltage ranges. The only time I hook up the illumination wire is when the face/buttons of the new radio cannot be seen at night when the car's interior is too dark....like the Eclipse head units.

Considering your aftermarket interface harness (between new radio harness and factory dash plugs) doesn't have an illumination wire in it....you MIGHT have to simply tag the new radio's solid orange to the red (switched 12V+DC) wire.

I don't remember you saying specifically what brand/model you were attempting to install...
 
Last edited:
The only reason that I thought that that might be the case is because on the key for the wire colors orange is the dash dimmer. I don't imagine it's a tragedy if I don't hook it up right, but it's still probably good to have.

My main issue right now is that I have no idea why my radio isn't getting power. Yellow and red are putting out power and black is working as a ground. Is there else anything it could be?

My 88 765 had 2 wires for the dimmer a "+" and a "-". I don't rememder how I got around this.
 
Back
Top