Wiring Details

Three aspects to wiring that I will detail on this page - Signal Wires, Speaker Wires, and Power Wires.

For the H700/7996 combo, I need to run 3 wires the length of the car:
-Optical for CD signal
-AiNet for radio and volume/sub control
-Display wire for the H700's faceplate

I'm going to run 2 additional wires:
-Standard RCA
-Second Amp Remote

While I'm there, I figure I'll plan ahead incase I need to add a non-Alpine headunit at some time.

I'll need to run all new speaker wire in this car. The only that is possible to re-use will be for the midbass. I would prefer to rewire them, but I have not had the chance to check it out yet.

For power wires, I'm lucky - the battery is already in the trunk.

With a little MDF and utilizing the factory battery hold down, I was able to fab a panel to hold my fuse holders:

Add some carpet....

Now for those other wires:

First I started by looming and color coding all of the wires in the install:

-White - left speaker wires (white stripe for tweet, grey for mid, black for midbass)
-Red - right speaker wires
-Grey - RCA
-Blue - AiNet
-Green - H700 Display
-Orange - Optical
-Yellow - Wires for possible expansion

Speaker wires are run down the sides of the car, the rest down the middle, then to the sides where they enter the trunk.

The wires are attached to the car via self adhesive mounts or to the factory harness approx every 8"

Here's some pics:

Passing into the trunk using factory grommets:

What my dash looks like now:

The next task was to rewire the doors, here are the steps I took to get one run of 14ga to each door:

Here's what the boot looks like attached to the door jamb and with the 8mm bolt removed:

With the boot pulled away from the harness, you can see that there is some room in there to fit a wire:

What I did was drill a two holes in the harness that would allow my wire to pass over the plug when installed in the door, then through the boot. The wire is as close as possible to the top of the plug when the two halves are joined:

Next I had to trim away some of the rubber seal and notch the plastic cover a bit so the plug would sit flush in the housing:

With the wire installed, you can see me ready to put the plug back in:

Before I put the plug in, I just fed the wire through the boot, and into the door. The boot on the door simply pulls out, there is no plugs on that side.

The Stinger 14ga wire I used just BARELY fits. The cover is still nicely sealed, and you can't tell it's been rewired. All the factory wires are still in place.

This kind of install would be a little more difficult if you wanted to add more then one set of wires to the door. I probably could have done 12ga, but that would be pushing it.