problem with 91 explorer harness

[chrisagunz]

I am a bit of a noob with car audio, I have installed a few headunits into various cars, as well as amps and subs, but this baffles me. I bought a wire harness for a 91-97 ford explorer, and it comes with 2 harnesses. One fits and the other doesn't, the one that fits doesn't seem to have any speaker wires, while the one that doesn't fit has everything, +/- for FL, BL, FR, BR. Am I missing or doing something wrong here? It was a stock cassette deck and I am putting in a Pioneer cd unit that I had in my old car. I included a picture I found online, the one on top does not fit but seems to have all the wires for the speakers etc, while the one on the bottom only has like, 6 wires, and confuses me a lot. Any ideas or am I just not seeing something?

Click to read more...

 

[starkfu 10+ year member]

yes, you are missing something.

The explorer has a factory amp, I believe the second plug is a square.

What you need is the amp bypass kit.

Best kits BHA-5514.

What you do then is wire everything behind the radio and then remove the right rear interior panel of the truck (not all that bad, remove the screws in the rear piece that holds the carpet down, then one screw in the side panel, a few clips in the side panel, and bend out of the way enough to unplug the amp and plug the bypass harness in).

 

[chrisagunz]

Oh okay, thank you. I did notice, that under the dash where the carpeting is, is where all the speaker cables connect, and it has it's own connector that goes up to the head unit. Is that what you were talking about? My brother said something about it switching it from 4 channels to 2, but I'm not sure what he was talking about. So in lamest terms, all the speaker cables come together to a connector that is under the carpeting, that connector then has another harness that comes up through the dash and into the radio.

Oh, and my apologies, the harness does have that second square connector built into it, I just couldn't find that specific picture.

 

[starkfu 10+ year member]

yea, you could grab the speaker wires at the passenger kick panel near the glove box, but I would do the amp bypass in the rear in case you ever want to get rid of the truck and put the factory back in.

you will have to cut the wires at that harness if you do it that way.

If you get the harness I mentioned above, you can go to the amp in the rear and just plug the bypass plug in place of the amp.

 

[chrisagunz]

Okay, thank you. Would that matter if I wanted to put a seperate amp into it? Like a sub box?

 

[starkfu 10+ year member]

nope, the speaker wires in question are for the 4 door speakers, the sub amp and box would be connected outside of those anyway, just drop the RCA and remote turn on lead and run them to the back from the HU.

 

[chrisagunz]

ah good point, thank you. I will let you know how it goes when I get the time to work on it again.