New headunit (Kenwood X794) Tuning help needed (and install pics)

So its been a crazy week at work. Had to stay late almost every night. In the middle of this unexpected craziness my new car CD player arrived. It came on Tuesday during the day. It was LOTS dirtier than I expected but some time with the toothbrush I had at work (that I cant use for its main function anymore) and some Windex and it looked better. The remote was DISGUSTING looking lol.
So thinking of the hassle it might be I called BestBuy to see how much installing it would be. They told me it might be just as easy as swapping the units given their relative age, otherwise I was looking at around 60 bucks and they couldn?t do it till Thursday. So I figured I would give it a shot myself as I am ?somewhat? handy at times. Normally just enough to get myself in trouble.

So Tuesday night after a really long crazy day I went to my parents house and started the ?fun? process of pulling out my old headunit. As this isnt my first rodeo it went pretty smoothly. In looking at the Kenwood wiring harnesses (since I am going from one Kenwood unit to another) I noticed there were some differences. That and I personally my cable management OCD came out and I was not happy with how they attached everything.

So I decided to do it my way which takes longer but looks better and wont unplug. Drenis had graciously let me hold onto my Dremel and Solder gun for a bit longer until after I got the CD player installed as I thought I might need them. I of course did :biggrin:. So I soldered all the connections which took me a good amount of time as I left my wire strippers at my apartment and my dad didn?t have any. So I got to use a sharp kitchen knife lol.

After all this drama I got it all plugged in, got my pre-outs connected, antenna wire connected and fired it up. Headunit started up but I heard no sound. Looking at my amps I realized they weren?t turning on.. I thought long and hard about it and couldn?t figure it out. So it being close to 11 I decided to call it a night.

Then while talking to TNHNDYMAN it hit me, I forgot to connect the remote wire (since it was spliced into the power wire and not part of the direct harness to harness connection. As late as it was and with no lights at my apartment I figured I would do it tomorrow evening.

My OCD body apparently wasn?t happy about all this so it woke me up an hour before my nomal alarm on Wendsday morning. As I couldn?t go back to sleep I figured I would try to get the unit up and running. Success! So I drove to work with everything connected and thought I was done. WRONG!

I had just ghetto run the iPod connection into the spacer bracket on my car at first. There was just waaaayyy to much slack in it for me, so I figured I would pull it out and using the Dremel cut a nice hole for that cable to go in so I could pull more cord if needed, or feed the slack back in.

After accomplishing that (which required a total tear down of everything for like the 10th time) I got the hole cut, and got everything back in. However the radio simply wouldn?t lock into the bracket. Then I realized what I had idiotically done. I had assumed since the bracket for my old Kenwood would work for this one. I made that assumption as the bracket for the new Kenwood locked down into my old one, so I figured they used a Universal one?. WRONG! The locking pieces were not long enough to grab my new radio. And to top it all off I had the old radio packaged up and ready to ship out to TNHNDYMAN at work.

So today on my lunch I finally got everything installed and started to get things tuned. I took some pictures along the way to document it all .

All pictures we taken with my iPhone because it was handy and I really didnt feel like taking pics with a DSLR for this lol. So their is a lot of dust and stuff that shows up that isnt visible in real life.

Also my car is old and a bit rough around the edges... but she still runs perfectly and sounds good so no comments about the condition of the car :razz:

Here are some pics of the old headunit, my good old Kenwood KDC-MP438U. It will be getting sent to another awesome Polkie TNHNDYMAN and I am sure he will love it just as much as I did







Here are some pics of the new install

Here is the wiring harness as I soldered the connections:


As I didn?t have any heatshrink on me, I just used electrical tape:





Here is a shot of the CORRECT bracket I had initially packaged up to go with my old Kenwood


Shot of the hole I cut in the CD shelf/spacer

Shot of the wires before connecting and hiding them


Installed!