How hard is it going to be for me to hide the wires? And more importantly where is the best spot to run the power wire through the firewall, and where to ground it? I have alot of experience wiring my cars but never had a truck till now.

98 Ram 1500
5.9L 4x4

 

another one for me? lol

anyway... its really easy to hide the wires... well depending what gauge your using... 8 ga or 4 ga is fine.. when you dip into the 1/0 ga (friggen HUGE!) it gets kinda tuff... assuming your tunning 8 or 4 ... if you open your hood and look at the fire wall.. right behind the brake master cylynder youll see an oval shaped gromet that has nothing going to it... this gromet is pretty big and can be used to route many types of wiring safely..... just punch a small hole with a small screwdriver and then "force" your power cable through that small hole... mainly so it keeps a good seal around the wire ... thast the best spot to come through the fire wall ... at the other side.. the cab side.. youll see the wire poking through... pull the rest out... if you choose to and you prolly will.. youll wanna go under the carpet... if you look at the door sill there is about 3 or 4 phillips head screws... remove them and you can pop off that plastice door sill... after thats off you can pull away the driver side kick panel and then pull up the carpet a little bit to route the wire to the rear... youll see a wireing gang channel stamped in metal underneat where the sill was... this is a good spot to run the wire ... or you can run it on the outside of the channel .. use caution when routing the wire through this channel b/c the same screws you just removed go through this channel and evidently could possibly run through any existing wiring or the wiring your installing... then just run it up to the back and hook up your goods!!!!!! if you got any more questions POST EM!

 

yah do what he sed.

also for your ground on something like that its best to ither go to the frame or right to the bat. ither run 2 wires like shott was talking about 1 for power the outher to the neg of your bat or you can drill through the sill channel and go to the frame i prefer the first way myself thow

also do you have a standerd or auto tranny if ita a standerd i dont think you have that nice hole in the fire wall cuz the clutch is there

 

if you choose to ground at the amp (wich is the best.. you should ALWAYS ground no more then 6 inches away from the unit...and fuze no more then 6 inches away from the battery... golden rules of installing!) like to the cab sheet metal... get yourself some star washers... these bite really good into the metal and really help out to gain a good ground... think about it this way... the size or guage of wiring you run has a direct relationship to the size of the surface area of ground it needs... say you have a 22 ga wire .. .it will only need very small surface area for a ground.. like a normal o ring terminal..... if you get up to a larger guage like 4 or 2 or 0 then youll need a larger surface area to help out with the added current... make any sense? i suck at explaining crap...

 

personally i dont like grounding 4ga or bigger wire in-cab. just look at the sise of ground straps used your wire is gonna be bigger than that plus you half to ground everything else that is there i know that the cab is mounted to the truck but its on rupper bushings wen running that big of ground i like it to go to something solid (eg frame). i know pepole do it and have no problems but its just a presonal prefrance. anouther instaling rule of thumb for every 10-20 feet bump up 1 size (4 ga to 2 ga) 20-50 feet bump it up 2 sizes (4ga to 0ga). on warn winches they must be grounded to the batt (thats what they call for i dont now why exactley) so if you put in wirring to the rear hitch you can push that 20 foot mark and i think thats 0ga or maby even bigger i cant rember ecaxtley

 

Some poeple say to run your rca's away from the power wire. I guess if you dont mind doing extra work you can run it seperate, but I personally have never had a problem with it. I wouldnt mess with running a ground to the battery.

 

i agree ryan... if you run a large system grounded to the cab that is mounted on rubber bushings may be a bad idea... but then again the cab is still grouned to the chassis... and you could always run an aux or a larger ground to the frame if needed... but its better to do that then running a large ground wire back the battery


habeba is right..if your running RCA's youll want to run them far away from any heavy duty power wire... what will hapen is ... youll get alternator interference that transfers to RCA's from large power wires... itll sound staticy and sometimes even a bad whine... its extra work but a good rule of thumb never to run them two together...

 

Assuming you will be pulling your seat out to run cables to the center console/seat area for an amp. This way you can hide the wiring easy and save a lot of headaches trying to fish wires. If so than the way I ran mine was to run the power wires along with the factory wiring under the door sill plate, right up the side behind the kick panel and followed them to the firewall. A test light is ideal for putting a hole in the rubber since it has a sharp tip. I ran the wire from the door sill under the seat just ahead of the rear brackets where there is a rise in the floor pan. Under the seat will keep feet and heavy stuff from damaging them. This is also where I grounded the amps. The rise in the floor pan was slight but none off the work is noticable.

To keep the RCA and signal wires away from the power, I ran them just to the inside/right of the drivers seat inner brackets and went straight to the left of the 4X shifter boot on the edge of the hump. It was a straight shot to under the dash below the stereo area. Only needed 10-12 foot RCA's instead of 20 foot ones also. No one stands on the edge of the hump and as long as you lay the cable flat and don't try to bundle them into a round bunch the padding will hide them well.

 

You guys pretty well covered it. Just remember, those ground contact points need to be CLEAN. Get whatever you are attaching to down to the bare metal. 90% of the noise problems I ran into when I installed was due to bad grounding.

 

You could always attatch the ground to an existing bolt in the cab such as a seat belt anchor bolt, seat anchor bolt, or lift up the carpet and run a small bolt through the cab with a washer and after that is all taken care of silicone the top of it and under it to prevent rust. Unless you have shielded wire on the power cable and the audio cables, run the audio and power cable separately. Most likely they're both shielded if you get high quality wiring kits. How many watts are you running?