The plan is to make a harness that joins together the factory harness, receiver, amps and speakers using the factory speaker harnesses without cutting anything. I ordered both the male and female ends of the factory stereo harness (Scosche FD23B and FD23RB) to start the build. All wires will carry straight through to the receiver except for the speaker outs, which will run to my amps. My return amp speaker wires will run back into the harness to power my speakers through factory door wiring via the factory harness. From doing some searching around on this forum it sounds like I might not have much luck given that not ALL of the wires are pinned into the connectors I ordered. For some reason Scosche and Metra only wire in the power, ground and 4 speaker channels. If it's a problem, I'll tackle it when I get to it.

If anyone knows, or has a link, I'm wondering exactly what wires are in that harness other than speaker and power wires... Would they be for Sync, Nav, steering controls maybe?

These are the harnesses, about $20 bucks shipped for both. Also, an excellent schematic of my plan!


2010 FX4 Supercrew Without Nav or Sony with Sync.

I'll post my progress if anyone is thinking about doing an install of their own. Also to keep it out of other threads as I'm already feeling like I'm inadvertently hi-jacking them with my questions and photos. It sounds like most of you that are doing installs of your own already have the audiophile system, or are integrating the factory amp and sub after buying the vehicle without it. Maybe this will be useful to someone who isn't. If you have any criticisms, feel free to fire away. I'm open to suggestions.

 

It should work in your truck as you are doing a similar mod the this one. https://www.f150online.com/forums/20...head-unit.html

I checked when I added my amp to the factory Sony nav system and Metra did not have a harness available for my configuration. I ended up splicing into my wires at the Sony amp under the console and everything seems to be working fine. I even spliced into my factory sub wiring and ran it through my Infinity Kappa 5 amp.

 

I just finished building a VERY small box to go under the 40 split rear seat. Volume is 0.34cu. ft. with 1/2 lb of polyfill. I figure it should react as a ~0.41 cu. ft. give or take a bit. I used a P3SD210 woofer (Rockford Fosgate P3 Punch Shallow Mount Dual 2 Ohm 10"), since it had the lowest mounting depth (3.5") and smallest enclosure specs ( .4 to 1.0, 0.5 being optimal) of anything I looked at. I havn't given it much of a fair trial yet, but am somewhat disappointed so far. Very muddy sounding, and lacking on the low-end, which is characteristic of undersized boxes and shallow woofers, so I'm not surprised by any means. After a break-in and some tuning it might come to life a little, or a bigger box will be built...

 

With that under the seat I decided the next step would be to run the power wire from the battery. Barritia, used a grommet under the main harness entry point on the firewall. I decided to follow his lead and do the same. The grommet came out easily by stabbing at it with a very long screw driver. After cutting a hole in the end of it and feeding the 4ga. wire through, it snapped back in. The rest couldn't have been easier. All the panels on this truck appear to snap in and out. I popped out the step covers and the lower c-pillar plastic to feed the power wire to behind the rear seats.

 

Mounting the amps was something I wasn't sure how to go about doing. I had some left over 1/4 hardboard from the 6x8" to 6.5" converter plates which ended up being a sturdy yet thin enough material to mount the amps on. I'm not sure if I'm going to leave them like this, but for now I think it looks OK, and I'll be able to access the gain, filters, fuses just by flipping the rear seats forward. Even with the sub box under the seats you can't really tell there is much going on.

 

For the door speakers, I used an old pair of Alpine Type R 6.5" Components. I was going to mount the tweeter in the sail panel, and might still do so later on, but they don't sound 'bad' in the factory door grille. I found they sounded best facing me on the sail, which would have been hard to mount, or on the dash bouncing off the windshield. I didn't want to run the tweeter wires through the doors and then take the dash apart... Again this install is intended not to harm any factory wires, so I used plug in harnesses for the doors which connect to the factory speaker plugs. Type R Coax in the back doors.



I've never used dynamat before, but I needed some sort of gasket for the plates, so that was my excuse to buy some. The doors are already fairly well insulated but this probably helped a bit more.

I don't think I can do much else until I figure out the harness situation. Once the harness is made, I'll need to run RCAs and speaker wire to the back, and hook the MTX RE-Q5 to the harness behind the receiver.

 

I had a chance to get started on the harness today. First step was to remove the factory radio and see how many of the wires are actually connected to the harness, and it turns out the cheap harnesses I bought have all of them. No need to pin anything else in, that I can see. Here is what the harness is looking like. Next step is to find a location for the Re-5Q and mount it. Then run speaker wiring to and from the harness to the amp and Re-5Q.

It doesn't appear that the Re-5Q will fit behind the radio, so it may need to be mounted with my amps, which would allow for very short RCA cables. However the draw back would be two pair of speaker wire per channel running from the radio to the back seat. Would that be a bad move?