How To: Run New Front Door Speaker Wires

I figured I'd be productive and put a 'do it yourself' how to rewire the door speakers. I see a lot of people have problems with that and I finally tackled mine.

1. The seats remove easily, so take 'em out and save yourself some hassle. (the rear bolts closest to the door on each side will either be rusted to hell, or they will break off. I threw 'em out.)

2. pull the head unit (cd/tape player) and expose the wiring. As you can see, mine's the neatest mess ever.


3. take off the kick panels. On mine, this requires a 7/16 socket with extension.


4. Take out the speakers and undo the clips. (You won't have to write down the wire color, because you'll be cutting them anyway, and not using them. They are almost impossible to follow through the vehicle to remove, so I just left them.


5. Run your new wire through the opening in the dash and down through the dash to the kick panels.

6. When you get ready to run the wire through the side wall, there is a grommet with the other wires. These wires are all taped together and you will have a hard time getting the wire through the grommet. I just poked a hole through the grommet and shoved the wire through it and through the door boot.




7. I soldered the wire to the speaker and just left them sitting by the door for testing. The next step is to connect the wires to the harness for your CD/tape player. Make sure you connect to the correct wires for your player, they should be labelled.


8. Once you connect all the wires, plug in your cd/tape player and test the speakers. Should be all set. Then connect the speakers back into the door. Replace your kick panels and the faceplate for the cdplayer/heater controls and you're all set.

Nicely done... Metal only please.

i sorta kinda rewired my speakers... i went the lazy way, i traced back the speaker wires to where they broke because of the stupid plastic splice they did from the factory. i cut it back a little bit and butt connected the new wire to it... good as new. i'll eventually get off my lazy butt and redo mine similar to what you did.

yeah I soldered directly to the speaker.

my brother gave me a cool idea for when i rewire them, he said to get 2 small shrink wraps and wrap around each plug then use the larger one to tie both wires together to keep it nice and neat

Now I know this is an old thread but I have it subscribed to and have a question. Once you have the wire ran to the head unit, how did you connect it to the stereo? Isnt it pointless to go with thicker gauge wire if your connecting it to the thin gauge stuff of the wiring harness that then connects to the headunit.

if thicker guage is all you have it wont hurt, the point of the thicker guage is so that it wont lose as much power going from point a to point B if it was me and i knew which 4 wires i needed to tie into, i'd just cut them and tire the new ones into the harness with butt connectors.

I have factory speakers and cd/mp3 player head unit, so I wasn't concerned with wire gauges. I just needed a replacement because through my troubleshooting I determined something was wrong with the factory wire.

I'm busy with a full rewire of my sound system - new harness from the head unit to a custom box in the cargo area containing an Audicontrol LC8 to convert the speaker level inputs to RCA, A 4 x 100w per channel (rms) amp, a 2 channel bridged 300w sub amp, 12AWG wire to all speakers and sub. New 8AWG power from battery, new grounds, etc. Not re-using stock harness or amp, only the head-unit itself.
I do this to all my vehicles - stock is usually at the limits of spec and often breaks down with age.