So, I've upgraded my HU. (Kenwood DDX6019)

And I've upgraded my front speakers. (Polk db571)

And I was shopping for a new amp to get better wattage to the speakers.

Problem:

Seems there is a new 'feature' on the 2007 models... (or at least on mine)

The front doors don't have the normal 'boot' for the wiring path from door frame to door.

They have a 'boot' on one end of the rubber path, but on the other end, a huge 2" x 2.5" plastic wiring harness. It plugs into a receptacle on the door frame.

I don't know if all of them are like this, or if it's because I opted for the Deluxe Mirror package with auto dimming driver sides and review mirrors that have turn signals in them.

Regardless, this basically means no routing of new heavier gauge wires for the speakers.

So, my magic question that I need to know the answer to:

To the VERY EXPERIENCED AUDIO MEMBERS ONLY, will pushing a 60 watt RMS signal through the factory wiring be a fire hazard? I don't plan on driving them past 80% most of the time, but 'you never know...' sort of thing.. so I just want to know for sure if it's safe to reuse the factory wiring harness/factory speaker wires with that sort of wattage.

Or am I asking for a meltdown and associated fire inside the dash at some point?

Thanks for the help,

E.

 

I think that you will be fine pushing 60 watts through the factory wires. I have been doing about 100watts for the past few months for the same reason.

That said, I think that rewiring the speakers would be MUCH more desireable. I know this topic has been discussed before, and it seems that some people have drilled the pin connector in the space where there are no pins. I took a look at mine and did not feel confident is knowing where the unused pins were. I ran enough speaker wire from the amps to the rear fo the head unit to finish the job right when I finally figure it out.

So, if anyone has drilled the wiring harness, could you PLEASE explain how you did it and how you determined which section of the harness to drill. I am a little frustrated that I spent all of this money on my system, but have the factory wiring running through the doors. Based on the number of replies to the other threads on topic, I think that there are a lot of people who could benefit from a little guidance.

Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.

 

I had the plastic connectors in my 2005 as well. I know myself and Brypink drilled them out for the bigger wires. It is really a pain to do it. You have to pull the entire ebrake assembly to get to the driver's side. You find the pins that are not being used and drill them out. If I remember correctly, I drilled the holes in the bottom part of the connectors, where there were no pins. You have to be careful not to break the connectors or drill thru any of the wires in the bundle. If can be done but, it takes time and patience to do it.

That being said, I would not think 60 watts would create any fire hazard thru the factory wires. I could be wrong but, I think they would be just fine.

 

theyll be fine

 

no chance of fire from pushing 60w... only downside to it is a decrease in signal strength from using the smaller gauge wire. you arent running anywhere near enough wattage to burn/melt down the wires

 

F'N' plugs!!! My typical outburst to myself when I go to put power windows or power door lock motors into a F150 with the plug-in door boots.

Pretty much an every day thing to me now. The passenger side plug is pretty easy to pull out and down into the kick panel so that you can drill out two holes but the driver's side you have to remove the three or four 13mm nuts that hold the emergency brake to the kick panel. There are two spots that you can drill out if you have a supercrew. You will have to pull the speaker wire apart and run them seperate through the door boot plug.

F150s and Superduties have these now.

I am going to try to remember to take my camera with me and do a step by step for customers.

On a side note you're good with your 60 watts of power through your factory wiring. Maybe a signal loss a little but not too noticable.

 

Good info regarding the stock speaker wires, I may just leave them and run my speaker wires from my amp back to the HU since I'm only runnng about 50 watts to them. What size is the factory wiring anyways???

I pulled the drivers side molex connector apart ('07 supercab) last night so that I could see what is required to do this right and pass speaker wires to the front doors and took a few pics. It's tight working between the doors without removing them but the plug will come out. Unfortunately the cab side plug is installed from inside and is very difficult to access for drilling (or reinstalling once you've pushed it out!). The parking brake blocks the drivers side and the fuse box on the passenger side. I didn't have much free space to drill so I'm considering using an area just to the side of the male plug (shown in green in pic 3) if I can get at it. Then again, maybe I'll just use the factory wiring and see how it sounds.....

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....So, an update.

I decided to pursue some better audio quality.

Thanks to Crutchfield's awesome customer service, I wasn't quite 'perfectly' happy with the Polk's (seemed to be missing low end, as in, MISSING, not just low powered) so I returned them, and opted for a pair of Infinity Kappa 682.7 6x8. These things are IMPRESSIVE. Sound imaging and accuracy is quite nice. And it reaches down to 40 hz, which is basically 8 - 10" subwoofer territory from what I know. (granted, without the immense magnet and voice coils, but still, with enough wattage, you can almost fake it by just trading out a little accuracy) But, with these hungry speakers, I figured the Fosgate Amp they had on clearance just wasn't good enough... So I returned that, and went an ordered....

An ARC Audio FD4150!!!

And it's on the way!! Actually, it should already be here, but UPS is out jerking around apparently as my dealer didn't get their daily delivery on time this morning at all, and has not seen hide nor hair of the UPS driver. (even though tracking info shows it 'out for delivery'!)

Anyhow, I'll be pushing 80Wx4, CONSERVATIVELY (Arc is known to seriously under-rate their wattages) so things are a bit different now. I have run dedicated 16 Gauge to the rears. (not tooo bad, just slid them around the side and through each boot)

For now, I've run 16 gauge up to the head unit, (under the carpet... pulled all the seating and the carpet. Woohoo!) add about 5 feet of slack for each side, and just tap into the front speaker factory wiring there. I hope the nearly 100W won't be too much for the front factory wire for the time being. At some point I will get around to pulling the molex and drilling and then using the slack to route the 16 gauge direct to the speaker instead. Thoughts?

E.

 

Meh....I know I dont personally have the ***** to run that much power through the whole length of factory wire.....I'd take it a little easy till you get that 16 gauge ran to through the doors.

I really wish I knew what size the factory wire is so I could be a little more certain...I havent looked at it for so long I just dont remember. Im just assuming its about 20 gauge. Even if its 18...which Im doubting, but possible, 100 watts is on the upper end of what it can handle.

My 2 cents anywho.

Nice choice on the amp

 

Hey KC....new to the form here but I 've been reading up on this Molex plug issue because I just ran into the same prob. last week. That's how I found this awesome F150 forum and this thread. I Left addt'l wire at kick panel to run to frt spks when I figured out. Had the e-brk assy.down, plug out and everything but didn't have the ***** to drill it either. Couldn't really tell which pin's unused. For right now I've grabbed the fact. wire at the harness in kick pnls. Not too concerned about the wire gauge either but would like to run all the way the frts. like I did in the back. The back is where I started and they had a small hole on either end of the plug that 16ga. passed thru fine. Everything else on install went fine. Nice and clean and working fine. Crossovers fit nicely under switch panel in void. Just finished last Monday night. I'll try and take some pic's and post when all done. Still working on sub encl.

Question??
Which pins are unused on the plug....exactly where do you drill? Any surprises??
What is your opinion on mounting amp behind seat on rear cab wall?? Primarily concerned about a heat issue. There was a post just tonight showing a nice amp install behind the rear seatback...just wonderin?
By the way, couldn't get pwr at the purp/blk at HU - supposed to be amp turn on. Grabbed another (Pink/??? I think) and it's fine...??
Any suggestions on head units guys and gals...still shoppin. Here is what I've got so far.

JBL GTO755.6
JBL P650C
JBL P652
JBL GTO1004D

Thanks.

 

Well I was hoping the equipment I ordered would come in today so that I would be able to install into my friend/customer's truck for Saturday and Sunday but it was a no show. I ordered second day and they sent it regular ground. F'N' idiots. We are going to be running new wires throughout his truck. A 2006 F150 Supercrew. He's going to bring it by so we can install the seat lift and I can take measurements for the box. I'll try to do a tutorial of what I do when I run wiring for speakers, door lock actuator wires, or even power window kits. I do however have a power window kit I need to install in a 2008 F250 that uses the same plugs in the doors.

Holder6 those are some nice products you have listed there. I used to carry JBL and Infinity up about a year ago. Have sold a few of the crazy *** large Crown amps to a few guys around here. I have one guy that bought the JBL A6000GTI from me for the mind blowing amount of $4200.00 to put on his six 15s in his Blazer. JBL and Infinity just got a little pushy with their amount of product they wanted me to purchase so I dropped them. Nothing bad about the product. They just wanted more numbers than what I could do.

My customer's system I was going to install tomorrow is entirely Boston Acoustics except for the Kenwood DDX8019 Excellon headunit. Going for a total SQ setup.

Up front we are running two sets of Boston Pro60 6.5" components. One set in kick panels and another set in the doors. For the back doors we are running another set with the supplied 5x7 adapters that come with the set. For amps we are running a a triple stack of GT-40 four channel amplifiers rated at 4x55 and 240watts bridged. One amp will be dedicated to the kick panel components. Another for the door components and a third for the components in the rear doors and the single GT210 10" subwoofer. The Pro60s feature seperate crossovers that are bi-ampable meaning we can run individual channels from the amps to the tweets and to the mids allowing us to fine tune the audio of each speaker. On the rear speakers we are simply going to run channels 1/2 to crossovers and let them split the audio between the mids and tweets leaving us the other two channels to be bridged to the single 10.

This setup will keep all the amplifiers un-stressed. All channels will be running at 4ohms except the rear GT-40 will have the 3/4 channels bridged at 2ohms for the sub which only needs a 0.5cuft enclosure. This should give us a really nice tight bass since my customer likes rock alternative and the occasional techno type dance stuff. As far as amp layout goes I think I'm going to build the enclosure to work on the passenger side and then on the drivers side I will stagger maybe two of the amps on top of each other and mount the third behind the seat. If I have enough room with the seat lift I'll try to make all three stair stepped and mount them on some 1/2 inch plexiglass lit up from behind. Just won't know till I get them in front of me. Each amp is going to get it's own Kinetik HC600 battery. These batteries are great. They are only 7"x3"x5" and are equivalent to one hundred 1 farad stiffening capacitors.

 

Personally for the best possible sound and everything yes run new wires but until you get over the 110W mark its worthless to run new wire. It will hold up but 12 or 16 ga is much better than the 20 ga stock wires.

 

This thread has taken a very healthy course for discussion, which is very cool.

Just to update though, I still haven't had the patience to run the wires direct to the front speakers just yet, so the new 16 gauge (and extra length of wire for later wiring completion) are tapped into the factory harness below the head unit. I only finally got the Amp installed yesterday; this fine piece of art is driving them... probably a little too close to the wire's threshold. So I'll have to get around to completing the wire run sooner rather than later.



Since I'm using part of the factory harness, I guess I'll just have to lay off max volume until it's completed... don't want a meltdown. The speakers are 2 ohm 100 RMS, and the amp is driving 160W @ 2 ohms....

E.

 

Ok, that changes things...Def. get that stock wire out of there. Like now, yesterday, last month would be even better
Thats damn near pushing 16 gauge at the length of wire your running (from the rear all the way up to the front)


That amp does look sexy back there though.

 

run the 12 ga just for safety. Does any other installer run a size bigger just to be safe? Or am i just dumb... lol.