I bought a Kenwood HU from Crutchfield (came with all hardware) and want to replace the Bose HU. I called a local installer and he quoted me $125 (around 3 hours) to install it.

Does it take that long to replace the unit? How easy for someone who never install a car deck before (like me) to follow the instructions and do it myself?

Thanks.

 

As long as you can match the color of wires on the deck's harness to the correlating colored wires on the Metra (or PAC) harness, use a soldering iron and a heat gun, it's not hard at all.

One problem that I ran into, though, was that the pre amp outlets were too low voltage for the Bose amps to give normal sound. Ended up going from the line level outs and through two $15 PAC NIS-35 Line Output Converters.

Removing the dash and old HU takes about 15 minutes. Soldering and heatshrinking the harnesses together about 20 minutes. Putting it all in, while making sure you don't have wires all over the place another 20 minutes. When you solder and heatshrink the harness, you can save a lot of time by bundling the speaker wires separately with plastic ties and the unused accessory wire/dimmer wire/etc. Makes keeping the speaker wires away from the power and ground wires easier when you slide it in to the dash.

I found the best place to ground the HU, was on the metal rack that the stock HU was screwed to. The original HU was grounded to that, anyway just through contact on it's outer casing.

Total 'labor' time was about 3hrs (first time, ever, doing this). Total time installing was about 4 days, as I kept running into 'little issues'. If I'd known about using the line outs and the LOC's, before starting, it would have saved me about 3 days of headache.

 

or you could have gotten one at bestbuy and have them install it for free

 

It took me a couple of hours... If you got the OEM Interface Harness from Crutchfield, the wiring is the worst part. Actually pulling the dash pieces out takes no time at all. Just be careful on the Crutchfield dash kit... I broke part of a bracket during multiple removals/installations.

 

I wanted to install a double din radio in my 03 maxima but was wondering what parts i needed i have the factory bose and i am not planning on changing the speakers out anytime soon