Have been trying to locate the original amplifier in my brother's 1992 Eddie Bauer, but I can only find the signal feed from the Ford cassette/radio and it vanishes into the dash with a bunch of other wires. Where is that darned amplifier, and which covers need to come off to access it?
(Replacing radio with Kenwood CD player).

Thanks,
Bjørnar

 

The factory amp on our 92 is located behind the trim panel in the right rear of the vehicle. You will need a t50 torx to pull the seat belt off off the panel. When replacing your head unit you should get two adapters. One connects into the harness in your dash and the other is the amp bypass (I'm assuming that is why you are looking for the amp).


Maniak

 

Thanks for your reply!

Now, does the amplifier bypass plug (which I didn't get) mean that I should send the signal directly from the head unit through the puny wires running from the dash and back there? Seems like those wires are a tad small for such high current use... Probably better to rewire directly to each speaker separately?

Will I be able to get the bypass plug through one of the car stereo vendors in the US (have a friend in Walla Wally I may be able to convince to shop on my behalf...)?

By the way, with an Explorer in Norway, I'm pretty much on my own. It's my brother's car, but since I have some mech stuff to fix on it too, he asked me to put in the new stereo for him... (I have an Excursion, which isn't any better). I guess there are no more than a hundred Explorers (most post -96) and maybe fifty Excursions licensed in Norway so far...

 

You can get the amp bypass from crutchfield (www.crutchfield.com). We started out using the amp bypass and using the stock wires. We then upgraded the system with some amplifiers and we then cut some of the wires (the wires going into the factory amp) and used them as the high level imputs for the sub amp. We ran a set of RCA cables from the Head unit the the amp for the mains (if our head unit had 2 sets of RCA's we would have used RCA's only). I am still using the factory wires to the speakers (outputs from the factory amp). We are running a set of Clarion Pro Plate speakers up front (5.25" main 1" tweeter) and Rockford Fosgate 5x7's in the rear doors. The factory wires works fine. We are using a Sonly 75x4 amp and have more power than the speakers can handle (so we are not worrying about the signal loss in the smaller wires). We have a 400 watt rms amp for the Subwoofer. The subwoofer has a set of 12 guage wire run from the amp to the sub (we did not have the factory sub). This combination works well for us. I may eventually replace/run wires from the amp directly to the speakers, but for the moment this works great.

Check out http://mark.legendz.com/explorer/stereo1.html for some pictures of what we ended up doing.