Electric Boogaloo

I swear. If anyone even utters the words “car stereo” I will kill them. You wanna know why? Because today, as a fathers day present for my dad we thought we’d be nice and get him some 6″x9″ speakers for the back parcel shelf as the general consensus was that the stock Volvo (top of the range 14 years ago) speakers were lacking in the oomph department. We went to Strathfeild Car Audio and picked out some Sony Xplōd 3 ways. Since we don’t have an amp and the Sony deck can only support 4 channels we had to unplug the rear door speakers, and the dash tweeters (no biggy as you can’t hear them anyway) and wire the 6×9’s into the system. Simple enough? WRONG! We started out by trying to remove the shelf so we could cut out the hole for the speaker to sit in but that in itself turned into a drama. Turns out, that in a 940 the parcel shelf is actually bolted onto the body of the car behind the seats themselves. Note: if any Volvo engineers are reading please proceed to flagellate yourselves with a leather belt wrapped in barbed wire. So, a relatively simple task has now turned into a mammoth one involving removing the back seat completely (not easy) unscrewing the shelf and cutting holes in it. Well, after getting up to that bit we realize the bump for the centre seatbelt means the grill isn’t going to fit in properly. So, we go back to Strathfeild and the guy fixes us up with a different model with a smaller grill (bummer, cos the first ones were 300w and these ones are 220w. It doesn’t matter really though because our stereo only pumps 52w per channel and it could actually make it sound better. Still, numbers are cool)

Anyway… fast forward to about 3pm. We’ve gotten back and now we have to lay the wiring. We pull the carpet up (not easy either. You have to unsheathe the seatbelt pretensioners [Google it] which is dangerous because they are pretty fookin explosive [they were supposed to be removed last service but someone neglected to do it.]) and we find the whole floor is in at least half a centimeter of water. (how it got there I’ll never know) Unable to find the leak we ignore the puddle and lay the wiring. That was the only part that went smoothly (thanks to moi) meanwhile dad was cutting the holes (the grilles were still too big so we had to shave bits off them) for the speakers. The MDF the shelf was made out of decided it was going to be a crumply bastard today so we had to go to great pains to get the drill through without snapping the whole thing. Fast forward past that it was re-assembly time. Or as I like to call it, push and tighten things until they don’t move anymore and hope to bloody hell it doesn’t come loose and kill everyone. I even got to lie in the boot and fiddle with the wires, normally a privilege reserved for kidnap victims.

Well. It took 8 hours (seriously) and enough curse words to script another South Park movie but we made it and that’s the important thing. bitch