Man, I am totally spent. This weekend I put about 15 hours into the system and most of that was wiring related. There were challenges at every turn. Here's a rundown of what I knocked down along with some pictures of the build.
First thing was running the RCA cables and the front speaker wires. I chose to run a set of RCAs for Front/Rear/Sub which are all of the outputs the Kenwood KDCX994 deck has. The immediate plan is to use the Front and Sub RCAs but while I was at it, I figured I would save myself some work for future in case I have a need for the rear RCA outputs. I pulled the drivers seat in the car (sort of). Turns out the seat belt is fixed to the frame of the seat with a large torque bolt. I have a set of torques wrenches but nothing that large. So I unbolted the seat and just moved it out of the way towards the back seat of the car. That gave me enough room to work. I ran the RCA cables down the drivers side of the vehicle using the factory wire conduits wherever possible. Here are a few shots of that. The factory conduits had enough room to house the RCA cables, speaker wires, and turn on lead.
RCAs and turn on lead route to where amp will mount which happens to have an extra factory hole in the conduit which I pulled the RCAs and turn on lead through.
The next thing I tackled was the center channel. The S60 has a factory location in the middle of the dash for a center channel. I always assumed this location had a speaker in it. But upon prying off the grill, I found it did not even have a speaker there. It was blank. Luckily, though, Volvo included the baffle for the 6.5" speaker which I was able to use for the Pioneer coaxial with just a little bit of Dremel modification. I am going to experiment with the center channel to see what sounds best. But for the first go, I am dampening the tweeter with some foam and using the low pass cross-over on the Zed Audio deuce set to 3500Hz. The deck will provide a HP crossover so that will effectively make a bandpass for the center. I'll experiment with some caps in series with the center as well in order to tweak the HP crossover point for that speaker.
Keeping with the theme of Zed Audio, a Rodek 225i bridged mono will drive the center. By controlling the gain on the 225i, the overall amount of center channel in the mix can be adjusted.
Next was routing the speaker wire into the doors for the fronts. I could have taken the easy path and patched into the factory wiring but after looking at the puny connectors in the molex connector and the gauge of wire, I just went for it and ran my own. This was a huge pain. The Volvo uses molex connectors. It took some figuring out how to remove them to get a look. I saw the Porsche build on this site recently and hoped I would have similar luck, being able to drill them out and run my wire through the molex. No dice. After staring at the door and connector for nearly an hour, the route I took was to use one of the factory bolt holes for the molex as my wire hole. Basically, there is a plastic harness for the molex that is held onto the door with two nuts that thread onto bolts that are reverse threaded into the plastic harness. I found that the reverse threaded bolts can be removed. One nut and bolt is enough to hold on the plastic harness effectively so I removed one bolt which left a hole for the wire to route through. What you see here is the result with the speaker wire running right along side, underneath, the molex connectors and then just punching through the factory rubber grommet. Looks easy but this was a pain to figure out how I wanted to do it. Probably took about 2 hours for the first door and 1 hour for the second door.
Lastly, no picture, but I ran the power wires into the amp rack. There was some Dremel sanding that needed to take place to widen the holes I had drilled into the amp rack. They weren't big enough. As things stand now, the fiberglass amp rack has the Zed Deuce and Rodek mounted in it. There are power wires running from the amps out the back of the amp rack so it is ready to "marry" with the RCAs and speaker wires. Probably this is a 1 hours job but I am completely spent. It's easy to make a mistake when you're this tired so I'll call it a night, crack open a couple beers, and enjoy looking at everyone else's build pics from over the weekend. If all goes well, I'll actually have the front stage up and working tomorrow night. Can't wait to hear how this amp sounds!
