Can't win for losing...

So.

A friend on preludeonline.com is selling his amplifier and I pick it up at a really nice deal. It's an older model, but I really like this particular model. Another friend in RL has a 3x10 bandpass box that he has nothing to push it with, so he let's me put it in my Tib.

Tuesday I get the amp and notice that the box is pretty beat up (thanks a lot UPS) but everything looks good. I go home and spend 3 hours in the cold running the wiring back to the hatch and end up screwing up my left rear 6x9 somehow that I have yet to determine. I get everything hooked up. I completely rewire the 3 dual voice coil subs so that I am pulling a 2.67 ohm load. I know that this is going to really be hard on the amp which is only rated for 4 ohms bridged (400 watts) But since I didn't pay much for it at all, I am not worried.

I get everything wired up and hooked up and then I fire the system up and hear nothing from the subs. I open the box back up and try connecting only one voicecoil to test and it still makes no noise. After some fiddling I discover a short in the amp under the power connection. If I nudge the power block just right I can get it to power on and work, but still nothing coming out of the sub.

Last night I disconnect the signal coming form the head unit and hook my iPod directly into the amp and test again, still nothing, so I open the box yet again and begin testing the other voicecoils.....

each sub had only one working voicecoil! I rotate the center sub so that the working coil connections are all at the bottom and I wire it up parallel. This makes the load now 1.33 ohms, I stop and consider running one sub in series to bring it back to a 4 ohm load, but decide that I am not out much at all if thing's go really south... screw it!

I hook it all up and it works! I have to rig it a bit to keep the power from shorting, but success nonetheless!

I hot the road out of respect for my neighbors and get about 2 or 3 miles from home. I'm sitting at a light at Kellog and Rock, headed east. At this point I am listening to "I'm The Supervisor" by Infected Mushroom and it comes to a particularly hard portion of rapid bass beats. As my car vibrates violently I am thinking "holy crap that amp must be getting hammered!" I notice that my headlamps are dimming with the beat, which surprised me for all the power I was pulling, but I suspect at this point the amp was severely overloaded and probably making close to 800 or so watts.

The light turns green and I take off, about half way through the intersection the bass just cuts out. I'm thinking that I probably overheated the amp and it shut off under thermal protection, that or it just shook lose the nice little rig I had going to keep the power flowing.

I pull into the Walmart parking lot and open the hatch and take a look, sure enough the power had just shorted. I get it nudged just so and start to leave, but it cuts out again :(

Now I think I am going to have to de-solder the power connector block and re-solder it to fix that problem. Hopefully that will be sufficient, but I was hoping to have everything working properly before the drive to KC Sunday.

bah.. I also have to get the left rear speaker working as well, it just sounds horrible without it. The sound stage is all screwed up and skewed to the right :(