When mulling over the ways to use the stock head unit with after-market amps, I came up with a way to tap into the hu without altering the harness on the audio side. In the end, all I had to do to the harness was tap into the radio-on line.

Here's what I did:

I noticed that the connector that we needed to tap into was entirely unnecessary after I saw the size of the pins on the back of the hu..... they seemed very familiar to me as I grew up tinkering with computers and electronics. In order to connect the RCA cables, I went to Radio Shack and bought a gold-series headphone to female RCA adapter and whacked off the female RCA ends about 5 inches long. I then went and grabbed my old RS232 breakout box (a computer relic) and grabbed a couple of jumper wires from it. These wires have a connecting end on them designed to grab and hold onto a pin. These also were insulated with heat-shrink. I used 99HT's instructions to then connect the wires/RCAs together and then plug them into the HU. Bingo.... we have sound. If you really don't want to tap/cut the harness, this is the ultimate solution. Any good electronics shop (Fry's, Marvac, etc.) should have extra sets of jumper wires for break-out boxes. If they aren't insulated, you can just get heat shrink and insulate them yourself.

I then, of course, zip-tied the new 'harness' to the back of the HU so it wouldn't fall off when removing/installing the HU.

Here's a pic:



Maybe someone can get something out of this :)

- C5B


[Modified by C5B, 11:10 PM 5/4/2003]