Rock On!

Two days later, many swear words, a little soreness, and a lot of lessons learned – I now have a new (sort of) car stereo:

This is the fourth car stereo I have installed, and this attempt rivaled the difficulty of my first attempt. The last two cars (2 in the Toyota Corolla, 1 in the Ford Ranger) all had consistent color codes as the after-market stereo I was installing. Not so with the Chrysler Sebring (2000 Convertible Jxi). Before, Red went to Red, Yellow to Yellow, etc, so the hardest part was actually stripping the wires to be twisted together with a wire nut.

This time, I had three seperate issues to contend with; the maintenance-free battery hidden behind the front wheel well of my car, the fact that I forgot the wiring harness for the stereo in my old car, and the fact that Chrysler has undocumented wiring schematics. The first took some time, effort, the release of interesting combinations of swear words, and beer. The second was resolved by Circuit City – a JVC 16-pin wiring harness set me back $20.00, but I can live with that. The third as pictured below was almost unforgivable. Here are two images of the mysterious “white”, and “gray” connectors:

I was lucky enough to find the The Rosetta stone to schematics on Crutchfield.com, with the following diagram:

Here, you can clearly see the alignment of the plastic connectors, where they clip into place, and the “normal” color mappings for the wiring coming out of the back. Normally, I would have taken these wires, and stripped them to connect with a wire nut, but since I picked up a universal adapter from Circuit City,  all I had to do was take a pick, and push the pins out of the white plastic connector (below):

This allowed me to simply slide and click the existing metal crimps into the female connector pieces provided by Chrysler. The added benefit is if I ever resell the car, and the buyer doesn’t want my “punk” stereo (or I am not ready to part with it), I can simply swap them back out since I never had to cut a wire.

I learn a little more every time I install a stereo, and it just makes me that much happier with the results. Thanks sweetie for one of the many wonderful gifts you gave me for Christmas. Now I can listed to books on CD again!