Last weekend a friend from my university visited me at work complaining that as she drives along, her speakers stop working, but the cd keeps playing. She has some generic Sony Xplod setup with head deck and a five-way amp for the two 6" splits in the front doors of her Mitsubishi Lancer coupe, 6x9"s on the rear shelf and a 10" sub in the boot. Naturally I go to the amp which is mounted under the passenger seat and notice one of the wires on the crossover for the splits had come off. I thought it was touching the passenger seat metal, reseated it under the grub screw and gave the system a test bash. (She complained the front speakers never worked, I wonder why, and once they worked that they were hard to hear... adjusting the levels on all outputs solved this)
She treated me to lunch and drove away happily. That night I get a call that it was happening all over again as she drove home but wouldn't be able to see me again until today. She came in today and my workmate offered to have a look whilst I was busy with a customer. He checked the system and it was sounding fine, then suddenly died. Grabbed a multimeter and there was only 7.5Volts at the amp!!! He traced it back to the 5AG fuse holder at the battery. Whoever installed it never tied it down and barely tightened the grub screws. The 8ga cable coming out of it had a darkened colour to the copper due to the high resistance heating up the cable. We installed a new fuse holder and secured it properly. The problem only happened while she was driving, so the vibration was the major factor. She took me and my girlfriend to lunch today.
Just goes to show how seemingly unimportant installation practices can cause severe problems later on down the track.
She treated me to lunch and drove away happily. That night I get a call that it was happening all over again as she drove home but wouldn't be able to see me again until today. She came in today and my workmate offered to have a look whilst I was busy with a customer. He checked the system and it was sounding fine, then suddenly died. Grabbed a multimeter and there was only 7.5Volts at the amp!!! He traced it back to the 5AG fuse holder at the battery. Whoever installed it never tied it down and barely tightened the grub screws. The 8ga cable coming out of it had a darkened colour to the copper due to the high resistance heating up the cable. We installed a new fuse holder and secured it properly. The problem only happened while she was driving, so the vibration was the major factor. She took me and my girlfriend to lunch today.
Just goes to show how seemingly unimportant installation practices can cause severe problems later on down the track.