I bought my car without a radio, I’ve never installed one but I bought one off crutchfield along with all the required harnesses and plates to install it. The issue I’m running into now is that it seems the previous owner also seemingly attempted to install a new radio and left my wiring mangled. Anyone know what’s going on here and could help me figure this out. There’s a bunch of brown wires I don’t know the purpose of. The wiring going to the speakers were also cut but I’ve since fixed them.

 

my bet would be the brown wires are for the speakers but I'd start by searching the ol' Internet for a pin out diagram for the radio connector. It should show the wiring colors etc. What is your model/year?

 

Man, this process is painful especially if previous owner installed an aftermarket kit without labeling anything. I re-done mine when I moved it to lower position, previous owner wired in subs and all kinds of other stuff, I tried to fix it but the wire have so many patch and Y connector I eventually gave it up, I would say much easier to completely re-do than try to work on the mess. If one end is messed up like this, odds are the other end is also messed up.

If you really want to figure out what these wires are for, get a volt meter, 240 OE radios are very simple, but some of them came with a small factory amp which I recommand remove. Test each wire and see where they go of if they are hooked up to anything, audio cables aren't always been hooked up to audio devices (One big audio cable on mine apperant was used as an extra ground cable, of course, not factory).

It's not a terrible job to re do the entire thing, and you will achieve a much better and trouble free result.

Btw, I like that boot on the shift stick, looks great!