I finished putting in a new stereo in the Mustang last night. I started this project a couple weeks ago, and I have been working on it piece by piece.

The first obstacle was taking out the old radio. One of the mounting brackets had broken behind the face plate. Damn! After great effort, and frequent breaks to avoid getting mad, I got it out. Whew. Enter new dilemma. There were about a fifteen wires coming off the back of the radio and no wiring diagram on the radio to tell you what wire went where. I spent the next several hours trying to match up wires with power and speakers with little success. I turned to my sources on the Mustang Forums online, and I found a wiring diagram and a how-to support for swapping out the radio. Excellent!

One problem was I did not see that there was a factory installed amp buried in the dash board. Huh! After removing that, and buying a new wiring harness from Walmart Automotive, I was back in business. I got the wires matched up and installed the new radio along with a new dash finishing plate. Looks good.

I also installed all new speakers. That was a chore in and of itself. Because of the layout of the car, I had to remove the back seat in order to remove the side panels in the back of the car and change out the speakers. Wow! What a lot of work. It was worth it though. I also added a couple of tweeters in the back to pick up the high notes better. Sweet sound!

Well, not entirely – the bass was missing. So, my next purchase was a subwoofer to kick up the bass. But the sub was too large to run off the radio – it would have burned out the radio. So I had to get an amp just for the sub. I installed that last night. I took out the front passenger seat and mounted the amp under the seat. Nice! I ran the wires off the radio to provide power and sound to the unit. Then I removed the back seat to gain access to the truck in order to run the wires from the amp to the sub now parked in the trunk. Success! After putting it all back together, I sat in the car listening to the radio at an un-recommended level of volume just to test it out. Sorry neighbors!

My first test of the new radio with the top-down and the wind in my hair will be tomorrow. I am heading out to a couple wineries with my friend Clay from Philly. Oh, and a cool feature of the new radio is that it has an auxiliary input jack on the front of the radio to plug in my mp3 player. So I can play the music off my mp3 player without any converters or transmitters. Cool deal!