Got a little bit done to the XJ over the weekend. No pictures because there isn’t a whole lot to see.
I installed the decent Pioneer speakers I bought from Best Buy last week. I hate ever admitting to buying something from that place, but they had them on sale and it’s about the only car stereo place in the area. The back speakers and the front passenger’s side went great – no issues. Then I got the the front driver’s side. I’m not really sure what a previous owner was thinking but there is a random accessory wire with an empty clip just sitting clipped to the door. No big deal. However, they spliced into those wires in, what I can only assume, was a lazy attempt at fixing a broken speaker wire. Well … they didn’t think it through very hard because they spliced into it and used the side going to the empty plug, not going back to the stereo. Obviously that didn’t work. So, instead, I got to buy some new stereo wire and pull both new wires. That was a little bit of a pain getting the wires to push through the rubber seal in the door, but not terrible.
At this point, I still had the headliner only halfway in. Well, I wasn’t paying attention and knocked it down in the back which broke the crappy crimped speaker wires they had done back there. I should have replaced it when I hooked them up but didn’t. So I went ahead and soldered on new connections there, too. So now all the speakers but the front passenger’s side have new soldered on connections to the speaker. I’m half tempted to appease my OCD and run the passenger’s side as well – although it was actually in great shape.
Then I started pulling wires for an amp and sub. I’m not into crazy loud music that people can hear from 3 blocks away – but I do love good music so I’m going to put a mild 10″ sub in the little cubby in the back of the XJ. Those wires went down without any issue since I have the interior pretty much gutted.
Once the speaker wires were ran I started putting the interior plastic back in. I got all the upper trim in, the oh sh!t handles, and the back lower trim. Now I just need my carpet to dry out. I’m not sure how to accelerate this. When I initially pulled out the carpet (probably at least 2 weeks ago now) the passenger’s side was soaked. I put the carpet in the shop and just assumed it’d dry out. It didn’t. Instead it’s still just as soaked as it was 2 weeks ago. I had it sitting outside in the sun yesterday for hours and it’s still pretty soaked. I need to get that dried out!
The XJ is now stuck waiting for carpet to dry out and I’m going to start pulling apart the donor and get my transmission ready. Hopefully I can make some good progress this week.