mauls

First off I bought one of those cd manuals off the internet and it doesn't have a radio wire diagram, and 2nd I tried searching but didn't find what i was looking for, so i'm sorry if this question has been asked a million times, but I appreciate you taking your time to read.

My factory radio lights up, never worked. The antenna wire is unhooked and i'm sure the speakers are shot. The only speaker that looks like it was hooked up to it was the one right on top of it on the dash.

Anyways, Im looking to install a cd player out of my 2005 ram into the glove box, and I just want to find out which wires I need to connect.

From what I could tell by looking.

Yellow is either ACC or 12v power
Dark Blue was the speaker wire under the dash.
The Yellow and Dark Blue wire were side by side in a plastic connector that connected in the back of the factory radio.
Rest are cut wires hanging down.


Here is the wiring diagram for my cd player

red -Acc power
yellow -12 memory power
black -ground
blue -amplifier remote
blue/white -power antenna
SPEAKERS
white left front +
white/black left front -
grey right front +
grey/black right front -
green left rear +
green/black left rear
purple right rear +
purple/black right rear -

Obviously I wont use all those speakers, I just want to replace the one in the dash, and the one in the rear seat.

jaunty75

First of all, no factory service manual will have wiring diagrams for the various radios that could have been had at the time. Those would most likely have to have come directly from Delco or whoever made the radio.

But you don't need it, anyway, because the wiring on the old radios was incredibly simple. Get a voltmeter and check that yellow wire and see if it's 12V all the time or only when the ignition switch is at ACC or ON. You want the latter. A 12V all-the-time power source would be used in a radio that has a clock so that it always keeps time, but radios in those days didn't have clocks.

Once you've established that that yellow wire has 12V in ACC or ON, you're going to connect it to the red wire on your new radio. Since your car didn't originally come with a radio with a clock, you're going to need to find a source of continuous 12 V power. One possible source for this is the wire that goes to the car's clock. Even if your car doesn't have a clock, the wire for it might still be there. I ran into this exact situation with my '67 Delta 88 when I put in a later, aftermarket radio, and, even though the car did not have a clock, the wire for it was right there under the dash, and I used that to connect to the equivalent of the yellow wire on your new radio. You need to connect continuous 12V power to your new radio's yellow wire, or your radio will not remember the station presets nor the time, if it has a clock.

If you don't have or can't find a clock wire in your car, then you will need to tap a new source of continuous 12V power, which probably means finding an appropriate fuse in the fuse panel and tapping into that. Or you could just run a wire through the firewall and connect it to the positive battery terminal or the junction block for the battery positive under the hood.

You need to connect the black wire from your new radio to chassis ground, and you probably will tape off the blue and blue/white wires unless you have these components.

As far as the speakers, you're going to use only the white, white/black, gray, and gray/black wires because you're planning to have only two speakers. So, again, you'll want to just tape off all of the other speaker wires.

The next step depends on how your car's original speakers were wired up. Sometimes only a single, positive lead went to each speaker, and the negative side of the speaker was just connected to ground. You're going to need TWO wires run to each speaker, the white and white/black to one of them and the gray and gray/black to the other. If you currently have only one lead to each speaker, you will need to run a second, separate wire. What I would do is just run new speaker wire to each speaker. To get to the rear seat speaker, that's going to mean going under the carpet or around under the sill plates and under the back seat bottom and up the back seat back. You will have to remove the rear seat back to get at the speaker, which you probably already know.

If you already have two wires to each speaker, you're good to go. Just remember which speaker wire is positive and which is negative and connect them up properly at the radio end and at the speaker end.

So it involves all sorts of under dash reaching up while lying on your back type of work, but it's not difficult electrically.

mauls

Jaunty, Thanks so much for all the helpful information.

I'm not going to bother with the factory clock, or even worry about saved radio stations. My only intention is to hook my ipod to the new cd player and play some 60's and 70's music when I cruise around.

I think the Yellow wire (from the car) is the ACC wire, I will put the volt meter on it tonight. Not going to run an amp or anything so it should be pretty simple.

Thanks again!

jaunty75

This makes sense. There was no reason for a radio back in the day to have 12V continuous power as they had no memory presets or clocks.

I think you'll get everything fixed up in short order.

mauls

Besides an aching back everything worked out good and it was real easy like you said. I mounted it in the glove box to keep it hidden and locked. Now I just need to replace my factory speakers. There were only two speakers in the convertibles correct? One in the center of the dash, and 2nd in the rear seats?

Sorry for big pictures
IMAG0295.jpg

IMAG0296.jpg

jaunty75

Looks good! I know what you mean by the aching back.

As far as I know, there were only two speakers in a convertible, but I don't know for sure what the situation was if you had FM stereo. My '67 Delta 88 convertible has a speaker in the center of the dash and in the center of the back seat. But it had only an AM radio, so the same sound was coming out of both speakers (although I guess the back speaker would have or could have had reverb), and thus it didn't matter where you sat in the car. I don't know if the speaker arrangement would have been the same if the car was factory-equipped with FM stereo.

When I put in my aftermarket AM/FM radio, I used the front speaker as the left channel and the rear speaker as the right channel. Not ideal, but I didn't want to be cutting speaker openings in door panels or anywhere else. It sounds fine.

Red Delta

I saved the aching back by removing the seats.

This is where I put my deck. I used part of an old adapter kit that I bolted to the underside of dash and a bit of pipe holder to support the back of the unit. The only downside is that I have to pull out the emergency brake handle out a bit to access the cd hole. :P

jaunty75

It looks good. It's good, too, that you didn't cut out the opening in the dash, because once you've done that, there's no going back.

mauls

I was torn between mounting it under the dash, or in the glove box, I found some replacement glovebox inserts for around $35, already ordered one incase I ever sell the car.

Your under dash mount looks great, I wanted to keep mine hidden so I hacked up the box

Red Delta

The nice thing is that it is hard to see if you are looking in through either window since it is so low and under. I hate cutting holes in my dash and used existing holes and bolts that were present. Also, I don't have to open the glovebox to adjust the volume.

Eventually, the bluetooth deck that is in my big truck is going to make it's way into the 66 for a nice wireless connection to my Droid.