Introduction: Got a Stereo and No Harness?

I picked up a Pioneer AVIC-F700BT, it was a deal so it was missing the preamp wire harness. There are times when you find a cheap car stereo missing a few accessories (thats as much as I'll say about that). When you do, you'll need a wire harness. I thought it would be helpful for certain people to write a how-to on making your own.

Step 1: Starting Out

This is the port that we need a harness for. It has 12 pins and handles the preamp outputs of the stereo for connection to an external amplifier. The harness for it would come in the box if this unit was bought new.

The first thing you need to do is find the pin-out diagram to tell which pin handles what function. These things are available all over google for whatever port you might find.

What else do you need: Soldering iron, glue gun, continuity tester, shrink wire, port connector, female a/v jacks

Step 2: Understanding the Pin-out

I found the diagram for this stereo on some forum. Since I'm making my own harness I have a choice which features I can live without so i got less soldering to do.

Here I'm going to use the six audio channels, the amplifier remote wire, and mute wire

Right now I'm ignoring the rear view camera and video hookups.

Step 3: The Connector

In the first image is the original connector, it had like 100 pins i think. You can get these from all kinds of catalogs like Digi-key, Allied or Radio Shack. I cut it down to 22 pins (not 24), it fit better so in the last pic you can see the two pins exposed. These handled the rear view camera so I didnt need those. But as you can see this fits perfectly and now we're ready to solder some wires.iption of the Step

Step 4: Extend the Leads

When soldering make sure you put some solder on both the wire and the connector, they'll attach much easier. After soldering use a piece of heat shrink wire to insulate the connection. This is very important because the pins are so close together and you don't want anything to touch. So insulate EVERY connection.

Heat shrink wire is available at Radio Shack and will be somethign you wont do without after the first time you use it. It is a larger diameter tube that slips on over your soldered connection, once in position, hold the soldering iron to it to heat it up and the tube will shrink tightly over the connection to insulate it.

Solder a wire to every pin identified by the pinout diagram. This can get pretty tedious. The end result will be very flimsy and will need to be secured later before you plug it into the back of the stereo.

Step 5: A/V Hookup

You now need to find some female A/V jacks. These are pretty hard to find in stores so I found an old VCR. Bust it open and take them out. The outside metal of the jack is the negative while the inside is positive so solder the leads accordingly. So the ouside will be connected to the audio channel ground (with this unit the ground is shared between the left and right channel of each front, back and subwoofer) Once soldered on, use a continuity checker to make sure that there is a connection.

Step 6: Secure the Connection

While trying to rip those a/v jacks out of the vcr, i broke two of them so i had to find these (in the picture) but it's the same thing. When you finish soldering all of this together use a glue gun to melt plastic over the connections on the pins to make sure you dont rip them off while installing.

Make one last check with the continuity tester. Since its impossible to test the positive connections when then unit is off, you can still check the grounds. Finally, to avoid being disapointed after you rip the dashboard off your car to install this, with the harness plugged in make sure there is a continuity between all the negative sides of the a/v jacks to the unit's ground wire.