Front and Rear Speakers
With the door panels off I could move on to my front and rear speaker replacements. I had been dreading installing these speakers. When I first bought them I took the door panels off to see if they would just be plug and play size wise. It didn't appear that they would be for either the woofer or tweeters. I was kind of bummed and was not looking forward to doing custom fab work to get the tweeters and woofers mounted. So I put the whole thing off until just recently. The alpine speakers have 4 screws slots at 90 degrees but the radius that they are on is slightly smaller than the threaded hole radius on the stock speaker mount. The adapters included with the speakers didn't match up at all either.
I decided to take another look at it and for some reason they seemed to fit this time. I think I may have originally gone straight to the adapters that came with the speaker instead of just trying the speaker with no adapter. Whatever the reason, I was excited that they seemed to fit OK. The screws don't cover the slot as much as I would like but it is enough that with 4 screws in place the speaker isn't going anywhere.
Here is the rear speaker before and after installation. The rear was simple plug and play. I didn't have to mess with the wiring.
The next thing I had to figure out was where to put the crossover. I really didn't want to put it anywhere other than on the door near the speaker to avoid having to run any wires from the door to the car. The only place it looked like it would fit was right next to the speaker. There was just enough space to make it fit. The door panel goes on perfectly. I used 3M double sided tape to get the placement right before using self tapping screws to permanently install it.
The left edge of the crossover sits flush against the edge of the stock speaker mount and the bottom of the crossover lines up with the roll off of the sheet metal of the door. Both good reference points for getting both crossovers in the same position.
For the front speakers I removed the stock wire harness connecters and just wired straight to the speakers.
One really confusing thing for me was how the wiring for the tweeters and woofers was done stock. Just looking at the wires on the door side of things, they branch out to the woofer and tweeter but it is really hard to see where they are coming from or how the two are connected if at all. My worry was that there was a crossover in the stock amp that was already sending the correct frequencies to the tweeters and woofers. I didn't want to plug my brand new reference speakers into the stock wiring without knowing what was going where. A quick look at the stock amp showed that there was only a single pair of wires coming out of the amp for each front speaker. This seemed to indicate that all Toyota had done was a basic split of the wiring and that there was really nothing fancy going on. I peeled back all the mushy electrical tape and my thoughts were confirmed. The single line coming from the amp was just twisted together with two other pairs of wires; one for the woofer and one for the tweeter. There was no frequency separation going on. In the photo below you can see a pink and purple pair of wires in the middle of the photo, those are the stock wires from the amp. I cut away everything else that was going to the speakers and replaced it with my own wires just so I knew what was going where.
I extended the stock wires and ran those to the crossover and then ran the appropriate wires to the woofer and tweeter. All this wiring is temporary. I have plans to replace the stock amp and when I do I will rewire the entire system with higher grade audio wiring and soldered connections at the speakers. That will eliminate all the stupid crimp ends and extensions you see in my wiring job. My goal for this was to just get it working so I could have some tunes.
The next part was what I had been dreading: Installing the tweeters. The stock JBL tweeters were pretty minimal. No housing, no substantial plastic around the tweeter. It had a nice threaded post on the rear of the speaker that fit nicely to the custom JBL mounting bracket in the stock location. My new Alpine tweeter was a bit larger, had more plastic around it and had no threaded rod. So it was not a simple plug and play affair. I wanted the tweeter in the stock location and didn't want to have to put it on the door pillar or something like that.
With the tweeter stuck to the JBL mounting bracket with 3M tape the plastic trim grill/cover could not be pressed all the way into place without making the hole for the tweeter larger. To make it fit I took a dremel and made the opening in the plastic tweeter grill / cover a little larger to accomodate the larger dome grill on the tweeter. Worked perfectly. I progressively made the hole a little larger until the trim could pop back in place while at the same time pressing in enough on the tweeter to hold it in place. The combination of the 3M tape and pressure from the trim was enough to hold the speaker in place without rattling or moving.
Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of the dremel work on the tweeter grill.
I reversed the door removal process and turned everything on. It all works and sounds fantastic. The stock subs are blown out so I keep the music faded front at the moment. The subs will be disconnected when I replace the amp and install a 8" or 10" sub. I am tempted to go down to a 8" so I can build a custom enclosure and put it in the stock location. I saw someone that had done that on their 100. It looked pretty trick. I have always had at least 10" but I am not looking to rattle houses when I drive by, just fill in the low end. Having it in the stock location would be nice so I don't have to move it in and out of the truck when I travel.
