If you think this looks untidy, trust me, you don’t wanna see the back of the van yet!

Doing wiring harnesses in 4 degrees is not fun.

This is just a quick post to say another post will be coming. Ironic, eh?

I’m working on bringing the van from ‘no tunes’ status to ‘holy <bleep>!’. It may seem frivolous, but music is important to me. It’s been a…dreadful…interesting project and after several days of work, it still isn’t done yet.

Wiring in 4 degree weather.

When I bought the van, several items wouldn’t work at all, the stereo being one of those things. As I’d suspected, a fuse took care of those things.

Excitement! The stereo turned on.

…Disappointment! It made a terrible crackling, popping racket. %&#@@!

Finding info on this era of GM stereo was unfruitful as to troubleshooting what the problem could be. I’d be on my own to figure this out.

I made arrangements to acquire a new, updated stereo. I’d start there because I needed something with an auxiliary/USB port. USB didn’t exist yet in 1995. MP3s were still a few years from becoming mainstream.

GM has kind of a sadistic sense of humor, bolting in their stock components so securely it takes an act of god to free them. Haha GM!

It took over 3 hours to remove the stock stereo. 3 hours of freezing, butt @ss cold contortions worthy of a circus sideshow act, along with bloody knuckles and colorful phrases. You could almost hear GM’s engineering crew giggling over your shoulder.

I may have to do a post on how to remove a mid-90s full-size GM van stereo because I got nothing upon trying to Google what was holding it in there. I found ‘removal instructions’ from one site, but after the basics of undoing some screws, the faceplate and the two bolts obviously holding in in the front, it left out very needed info about the lovely bolts GM stashed on the sides of the unit in difficult-to-reach places (standard small socket wrenches don’t fit well in the miniscule gap provided) that you’d have to wrestle free to complete the job.

Roseytail  got a smarticle idea to stick the phone in the gap in the dash where we couldn’t force our eyeballs into and grab some shots with the camera (proxy eyeball!) to try and see what was holding the stereo. Success! She has really good ideas sometimes.

Never gonna let you go, gonna hold you in my dash forever…

There was another bolt like the one above on the backside bottom of one of the DIN cage front tabs. That was a terrible place to try and reach. Ugh! Roseytail encouraged me to stop for the day, but this was becoming personal.

After many hours of hard labor, the stereo was born.

Freeing the stock stereo was just day one. I ended that day with scratches and decorative bruises (literally). Right now I’m on day three or four? I’ve now lost count.

Day two. After wiring in a new harness, replacing the stereo did not solve the crackling popping racket.

Yes, I wept profusely. That didn’t solve the crackling popping racket either, but it did blend right in with the din coming from the Bose door speakers.

There were two plug configurations. One stock, another wired in as a ‘bridge’. I’d hooked up the stock plugs after wiring in a new stereo harness. This was mostly in the spirit of testing things since I had no idea of the sound system’s configuration, couldn’t find any information upon Googling, and all the cheshire wires vanished into the bowels of the dash leaving only a grin behind so they couldn’t be traced.

Excitement! The new stereo worked.

…Disappointment! Sound was only coming from the 2 tinny stock GM speakers in the dash.

It sounded like crap. Switching back to the bridged plug configuration only produced the ghastly racket from the door speakers.  Frustration!

What on earth was the problem?!

It was cold and dark; this was the 4 degree day. A soothing icy draft would blow down the waistband of my jeans whenever I had to bend over to do something making me feel like I had plumber’s crack. The heck with this! I was out of daylight. I’d have to work on it again the next day.

To be continued…