How to install power wires to your amp

So it doesn't look clean? What's happening? You all know who he is. Everyone knows what it is.

power

cable to

your

amplifier if this is

your

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install

ation , that's what this channel is about, so without further ado, let's start right, as you can see, today we are like a bully in the garage. I thought you wouldn't mind, as long as the information is good, there are two types of terminal styles you will see. on these amplifiers, uh, let's start with this one, this is a pioneer amplifier, it's an old school amplifier and it has spade terminals and the spade terminal style connector has like a little plate on the bottom and then there's a screw on the top and what.

What you're going to do is you're going to take your Phillips screwdriver, you're going to turn it around, you're going to stick the wire under there, and then you're going to turn it down. This is old school. This is literally outside my graveyard. I chose it strictly for video so it's a little dirty but this one here is a much higher quality zapco on this amp and these actually have these set screw style terminals where they have the four gauge inputs here and actually you have to take an allen. take it and twist it and then this little piece spirals up and then you insert the wire in there and then it goes in the opposite direction and comes back down what you want to do with this style of amp with the spade terminal style. amp if you want to use a spade terminal and this is what it looks like so you will have one that comes with the red boot and one that comes with the black boot and that is there so you can identify the difference between the positive and the negative, but Honestly, below is literally the exact same connector, so what we would do in this case there's a couple of different ways we can do this, we can take our cutters, strip the wire back just a little bit, usually you'll I do a little turn. on it like this and then you want to put it like this and then you want to crimp it now we can crimp this a couple of different ways some may have a ratchet style crimper these are the old school climbs we can use crimp for now although this is a four gauge, technically it will work, it's not ideal, but sometimes you have to understand it how you live.

I have a hydraulic crimper that I bought from Amazon. This guy is here and he comes with all these different ones. these different dies and you basically pull it back, put the wire in and then hydraulically crimp it. This little thing right here on the back pops up and gives you a nice crimp. Honestly, I would just use that for zero gauge just with this, we're going to go ahead and crimp it this way, so I'm going to put it on the non-insulated, put the crimp right there in the middle, use two hands, crimp it real good, you'll get something So.

A flat curl like that is still a good curl because I can pull it and not rip it out and that's me using a little bit of force right there. I'm not even lying to you, so it's still a good curl, but you'll have to do it. I'll probably crimp it a couple of times to get it really nice, so now that we've done that we can take our boot, slide it over the top and that's it, so that's the crimp on the ground wire, now we can give one more step. Also, although this is a good crimp and we can actually solder, we can use a little bit of solder and then we can heat the back, style the back of this and we can just feed the solder into the front here, just use something to type. to prop it up if you have a vise, a vise is probably going to be the best and I have this little torch, I bought it at Home Depot, they sell it at the loading dock for like five bucks, you put this part down and then there's your flame.

So I'm going to heat this part up and I know it's going to get hot because once it gets really hot I'll be able to put this solder in here and they'll start to melt completely so that's what I'll do now of course you don't have to use a blowtorch , you can use a soldering iron if you want, but the blowtorch is easier, it's faster for me, I just make sure that while I'm doing it, I'm trying. In order not to heat the jacket down, I'm actually on top only in the middle part and of course if you are using a larger terminal that will also be better, but heating the metal is enough.

You can see we have a little weld there on the top that literally goes nowhere, so there's a couple different ways to do this to cover it up, we can take the boot that comes with it and before you put this on. you gotta make sure this is cold, this isn't cold, when you put this little plastic boot in there, it's going to melt once it goes down, so you gotta make sure it's cold enough before you just slide it in there like that. slide it down and then boom we have solid ground now another way you can do it if you don't have the trunk let's say you just have the terminals this right here is called tessa tape it's a cloth style tape you have You've probably seen me wrap some of my harnesses with it.

If you've ever seen me work on some of the foreign cars like BMW Mercedes, they use this on their factory harnesses just to help clean it up, you could use just a little bit of this. but we're using the boot, all we're going to do now is turn our terminal towards the ground, stick that scoop in and turn it down like this, now we've got our

power

, uh, solder, we've got our ground. solder now let's get to that remote wire the remote wire is pretty easy uh I'm still going to use the spade terminal, but this one I have a small little 18 gauge primary spade terminal and with this one we can literally just strip our wire back with the crimpers I always like to give it a little twist if for some reason you have a spade terminal that's too big sometimes I like to bend it a little bit like this then put the spade terminal in and then we're going to use the insulated part of our crimpers since it has insulation and now you still have a good crimp.

If I can be honest, there is no real need to solder this part, let's just fix it. on the speaker cables we're going to do the exact same thing, we're just going to take our cutters, we're going to use the exact same spade terminals, so now we're done with the pioneer amp, we've got our power. our ground, our remote control and our speaker terminals are now the only other thing you would do to help clean this up. You have a couple of options. You could take that test tape and just run over the terminals or before putting them in.

If you want, in case you have a little wire that's a little frayed because you don't want that or you can take some heat shrink, put it around the terminals before you put them in there and then just heat it up. with the torch or a lighter and then they will clean it much more. This is the main thing I see when using the spade terminal style amplifier, they will take the speaker wire and split it like this without the speaker. wire, this is a four gauge power wire, they'll do this with the power in the ground, they'll take it like this and then they'll try to get it in there and then twist it down into these spade terminals even though they have these little black blocks between them to help separate them, you can still have a frayed wire from this and you don't want the power to touch that ground because then you're going to blow these fuses, mess up something inside the amp and it's just going to be a bad day and the next thing I don't want You guys doing this really gets on my nerves.

Some people take four gauge power wire and cut as much wire and just kindly. of trimming it, they will cut this piece, throw it in the trash, rotate this to try to get it to fit on that terminal again. Not a good idea, just go ahead and grab the spade terminals and put them on. I don't want to. To see you all doing this, I promise you that if you can spend your money on the amp, you'll spend an extra five dollars, get the terminals and you'll be fine, so next we'll move on to the zepco m and the zapgo has the uh. attach screw style uh terminals, so they actually have two different sizes.

I believe the speaker output and remote output are a 2.5 allen head and the ground and power are a number three allen head. Now I don't have my T handle uh allen heads or any allen head wrench with me so I'm using these little shanks that I have and I'll put them in my drill it'll make them easier too so one thing I usually like to do is to take this to the end. as high as you can go without leaving the amplifier. I can probably use this to turn it enough, you don't need much for the remote control and the power cord, so let's just turn this.

A little bit now, one thing about this more professional amplifier than the spade style is that you can just put a bare wire in it if you want, so let's take our clones. I'm going to take away one thing that I like to do and not do this with the power on or at least with the fuse on, but I like to take the wire and then what I'll do is place it against the terminal like this and then kind of put my thumb here and then it lets me know how much wire I need to strip to fit it inside the amp, so I'm going to carefully put my finger right there, twist that pop off and give it just a little twist like I like to do and now when we know we can stick our wire into that right there, as you can see, I've got my ground wire in there and I did a good job measuring like I said normally.

Take the wire and I'll put it back, take my finger and pinch it right there and that lets me know how much I need to shave the stick, but as you can see now a little piece of wire is showing. There's no frayed wire since I twisted it a little bit and glued it on, but I'm going to show you a tool that you can use to make this look even cleaner and that's by using ferrules, these are ferrules and basically all they do. If you strip the wire, you tape it up to where the wire or the jacket will be on this part and then you have nothing but the wire on that part and then we're going to put all of that inside the amplifier now.

I have a wild crimper, that's what it is and I think this works for 10 to 22 or 24 gauge wire, so it'll be able to take care of our smaller gauge ferrules, but it won't do anything with our larger gauge because we win. We're not actually going to be able to get this through there, which is fine because I'm going to show you what's going to happen when we put this into our larger gauge terminal, but do you see that little notch inside the wire that's what it does when that Set screw actually goes all the way to the end of the power cord.

The exact same thing will happen once we put this in, so let's twist the cable up a little bit, take this and push it all the way down. You may have too much wire, we'll push it up like this now, if you want, you can solder the top of this if you want, just like we did, just put a little bit of ply over the top, but not really it is necessary. now we're going to take this, we're going to stick all of that inside the terminal like this and then we're going to screw that bad boy in and that's going to make that connection solid and it's going to look clean, we don't.

I have some frayed wire or something, so let's go ahead and do that for our next positive. Now I'm going to show you the smaller gauge ferrules that we will use for the remote cable. I know they would have made that ferro blue. It would have been too perfect, but it's all good. I'm going to take that back strip. I'll still twist it and put my little curve on it. I'm just like that. it becomes a habit at this point stick that all the way in then we'll take our wild curling iron which gives you that nice little curl and then now you can see little ridges that are there that's what it gives you so now and I'm just tightening this with my hand so everyone can see that we're going to do the same thing with the speaker

wires

using a larger gauge ferrule, so it doesn't look clean, that's it for this video.

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