Why am I having such a hard time setting up a radio?

Amp behind there with 2 square connectors is premium sound.... You need the wiring kit for the premium sound version of your car. They sell it at wal-mart... Just match the colors to the wiring kit to your headunit, and plug into the 2 little square connectors. Enjoy

i could not find a harness for mine so ended up cutting the amp wires and hardwiring the radio right to it. I hate doing it that way, but it was the only thing i could do to make it work.

Dr.

You could also just yank everything stock from it and rerun new wiring, which is what I've done in my 88. From the tweeters I ran wiring to the head unit, from the door and rear deck speakers I ran wiring to my amp in the trunk. Currently, there is one amp for four of the six internal speakers, and one for the subs. For the power connection I ran direct fused connection for everything, the stock wiring kept blowing fuses. You may want to consider doing that since in my car, dunno if it was a random mistake or what, but the radio was wired in with the internal lighting on a 5 amp fuse. Basically anytime the volume went up, it blew a fuse and all the lights went out, and I'm not talking about really loud either. That was with a JVC 20w x 20w tape deck, much less the 50w x 4 JVC I have now. Got sick of that crap and direct fuse connected it, problem solved. As far as that other amp goes, its probably a bad idea to run your head unit into that. Connecting more than one amplifier to a speaker is a bad idea, as it can very easily damage one or both amplifiers, unless you have Dual Voice Coil speakers for your car, then you could run one amp on one coil and a second on the other, but you cannot run them piggy-backed like (I think) you are talking about doing. If that's not what you're thinking then feel free to ignore that comment .

It really isn't all that hard to do complete wiring revision like that, but it involves a little effort. At any rate, if you think you're interested in going that route let me know. I stripped my car down to bare metal, deep cleaned and scrubbed everything, put aftermarket sound deadener on the whole thing, ran all my wiring, then put it back together, total time on that was probably around 30-40 hours of work. If you were to just run new wiring, that would probably take 3-5 hours depending on how familiar you are with the interior of your car.

My buddies tempo has the premium sound package, and somehow I managed to hardwire the deck in with the amp working.
OT, but there were rectangle plugs before and after the amp right? Meaning that straight from your main harness there are the rectangle plugs. Then they connect into an "adapter" style harness that turns the rectangle plugs from the main harness into square plugs that connect into your amp. With me still?
Now on the input side of the amp there is a square plug with another "adapter" style harness that makes the square plug back into rectangle one so its able to be plugged into the back of the amp.
Its not a very complicated set up. Sorry Dr. I got off on a tangent and I forgot why I was posting. What part of the harness did you wire into?
I know Ford liked to use common grounds for their stereos, that might be why there are "missing" wires.

MSM0075 said:

I posted a few days ago in 'Sound & Shine' but I dident get that much feedback..

http://forums.stangnet.com/showthread.php?t=408529

Its like no one has installed or even seen an amp in their '88

I hope someone can help me out cause I've been tryin to figure this out for weeks...

Click to expand...

That factory amp really isn't that good, now if you are using a stock radio then maybe. Its only putting out like 20 watts from what I hear and most decks now days put out 30-50x4 channels and proubly just fry it anyways. Also my car has both plugs for preimium and non perim sound, so make sure if your car has this that you are using the right connectors. I just got through putting a XFM in my 93' and it had some problems with the factory wires and we just disconeccted the amp and rewired the speakers. I really didn't want to do this but after spending that time and money on adaptor kits and plugs and I got speakers fighting each other I said to heck with it. If you really want some watts I would replace that stock one with a better one and go from there.