Stereophonic Sound

I expect that I spent around ten hours installing the new stereo in my mother-in-law's car. I say this not because it took and extraordinarily long time, or that I was extremely efficient with my time. I don't expect either one is the truth. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The fact that I spent chunks of those hours in front of a computer screen asking for help from YouTube, and Googling wires and connections and support form various sources.
I didn't do it like in the olden days. Way back when, I would take the wires in the box and connect them to other wires that I was pretty sure would give me the result I was after. I had heard stories of diagrams that would produce understanding that might lead to and expeditious installation, but I had also heard that only wussies used wiring diagrams. After all, how hard could it be?
Plus is positive. Minus is negative. I was even pretty hip to the ideal that a straight copper wire would be the positive and zinc was the negative. That and a pair of wire cutters would keep me busy for at least a few hours. Getting that tape deck to sit just so in the cavity where there had once been nothing but an AM radio was an exercise in patience more than it was electrical engineering. When I put three-way speakers in the back of my Volkswagen bug, I used cardboard boxes filled with rags to hold them up to the deck behind the passenger seat. Not exactly elegant, but loud. Real loud.
Because that's what it took, way back then, to get me to hang upside down on the floor of my car, looking for the fuse that wouldn't blow if I ran an equalizer out of it. I would like to say that all that additional equipment and attention made me some sort of authority on sound systems, but mostly it just meant I managed to stuff more noise into the small cars I owned.
And then there was the Vega incident. The one where I purchased speakers that were far too large for the polite holes put there by the Chevrolet designers. No matter. I had a couple of friends who were more than happy to climb into the back seat with a jigsaw with a metal blade and when that tapped out, a pair of tin snips that my buddy the wrestler hacked and gashed until those Jensen Triaxials fit just fine.
More or less.
Because in my youth car stereo was a transitory state. There was always something to switch out or update. There was always one more thing that would make interior of my vehicle the place to be. Or so I believed. Eventually, I started to accept the stereos that came installed in the vehicles I bought. I was the market for those cassette adapters for external CD players. Why couldn't my mobile sound compete with that inside my home?
Fast forward to this weeks challenge. I learned about wiring harnesses and fuse taps. I surrendered to calling my son for more help than I care to admit, but he talked me through it. When it was all over, I had the faintest urge to try doing something similar to our family car.
That passed.
For now.