Video: VW Super Beetle Stereo Installation

Video Overview:

Cars and music go together like ham and cheese, peanut butter & jelly or lamb & tuna fish. Vintage cars especially almost seem to require a good sound system as there isn’t much better than going for a weekend cruise on a nice day with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up. We’re going to install a bolt in, preassembled Vintage style radio head unit in the dash of our 1971 Super Beetle. Other than cutting the padded dash for the radio face plate, no other cutting, trimming or other modifications are required. Follow along as our tech continues the restoration of our Vintage VW.

Video Transcript:

Hi! I'm Sam with JBugs.com. Thanks for tuning in while we get our new stereo installed. Now that all of our seats are installed, we're going to begin wrapping up the last few bits on the inside of the car, before we move into the trunk.

That starts by hooking up our subwoofer box that sits behind the rear seat. We ran the wires for the sub, and the rear speakers, before we installed the carpet and we marked the rear subwoofer wires so we can identify them later. The ends of the wires are stripped off and hooked up to the spring loaded terminals on the side of the box. The rear seat backrest is set back into place and now we'll prep the rear speaker deck.

The speaker deck has pre-cut holes for 6 1/2 or 6x9 speakers and we chose to match our front Kicker KS speakers with another set. We cut the material out of the center of the rear deck, for both holes, and mount the new speakers with trim rings and follow the rings with the grills.

Back at the car, the ends of the speaker wires are stripped off and the appropriate sized terminal ends are clamped on. We use 1/10 ends for the negative terminals, and 3/16 ends for the positive terminals. The speaker deck is set over the luggage area so the speakers can be hooked up. Then, the rear deck is set in place, on top of the seat backrest, and below the rear window. We'll move up to the dash but before we install the stereo head unit, we want to get the fresh air control knob assembly mounted as it sits underneath the radio.

Inside the car, we snap the two original dash knob trim pieces in place in the holes. Then in the trunk, the restored fresh air assembly is set in place, with the posts sticking through the dash and the assembly is screwed in place. Inside the car, the control knobs are pressed onto the post. Now, we can check that the cables operate correctly. Now we can get to mounting our new USA740 Custom Autosound Vintage Style head unit.

It has a number of cool features but most important to us is that it has Bluetooth built in so we can stream music from our phone to the stereo. Custom Autosound builds the radios specific to each model so there's no need to assemble the radio knobs, trim plates, and whatnots. It comes ready to install. It's important to note that the radios will only fit a stock, uncut dashboard. If your VW dash has been cut for a modern single din stereo, fitting a vintage radio may not be easy or even possible.

We start by pulling the face plate off by removing the two dash face nuts. We could use the faceplate as a template for cutting our padded dash. We opt for a more original style installation and use an original VW dash trim plate. The trim plate will act as a bezel for the dash and the face plate. Since the dashboard already has a trim line for the original trim plate, we can use it as a guide and carefully cut along the line with a razor knife. The plastic dash facia is pulled off. Then we can pull out the dash foam and test fit the bezel and the faceplate.

The faceplate is pulled out and the radio is set into the dash from inside the trunk. None of out vintage radios install from the front, they all insert into the dash from the back side. In the trunk, we make sure the radio doesn't contact any switches, wiring, or the wiper linkage. Then, inside the car, we can install the spacing washers on the knob posts. The face plate is set over the posts, followed by the washers, and finally the nuts which hold the faceplate in place. The nuts are tightened, the back knobs are set in place, and the main knobs are set in place as well.

Back in the trunk, looking at the back side of the radio, we can see that Custom Autosound Radios have two separate wiring harnesses. One for the power and one for the speakers. Since we are using amplifiers to power our speakers, we won't need to plug in the speaker harness which will make the installation cleaner. The power harness has wires for the ground, key and battery power wires, an amplifier turn on wire, and a power antenna wire. We won't be using the amp turn on wire as we're using a key hot signal from the fuse box.

We did shave our antenna hole though so we will be using a low profile antenna that will mount to the windshield. This will be powered by the antenna power wire. Before we do anything else though, we want to support the back or the radio. We'll use the supplied bracket. We'll cut and bend the bracket to mount from the radio down to the brace behind the ash tray. Now we'll hook up the RCA cables that we ran before we installed the carpet.

The front and rear RCA are connected to the appropriate receptacles on the back of the head unit. Then we decide to reroute them through the glovebox mount so they'll be held up and out of the way. The subwoofer RCA cables are run to a Y splitter and connected to the subwoofer RCA cable from the stereo. The auxiliary RCA cable to stereo plug is connected to the input RCA on the back side of the head unit. We'll run this cable along with the USB cable into the glovebox later so that they're easier to get to inside the car. As the USA-740 radio does have Bluetooth, it comes with a microphone.

We found that the cleanest place to install it was at the corner of the dash, at the bottom left of the windshield. Here, we can tuck the wire in behind the dash pad and route it up to the bottom of the dash using the original rear window defroster switch hole which we're not going to be reusing. Then, we can run the wire up to the stereo and hook it up there. Now we can hook up the power harness for the stereo.

We cut the ground wire to length, crimp on a connector, and connect it to the ground junction on the body. We run extension wires from the battery terminal and the key hot terminal on the fuse box. Those wires are connected with bullet connectors to match the ends of the stereo harness. Then, once we get our hidden antenna in, we decide the best place to mount it will be on the right side of the dash, at the bottom of the windshield. For it to work best, it needs to have a clear view of the sky and this would be the best place we can think of. From here, we can route the cable along the back edge of the dash, through the corner defroster vent, to the stereo. The antenna end is connected to the radio and the power wire for the antenna is connected to the antenna power wire from the power harness. With that, the stereo installation is complete and we can get to working on the other parts and pieces in the trunk.

Thanks for watching! Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below. Click the like button and the subscribe button if you haven't already. And when you need parts or any other things for your vintage VW, head on over to JBugs.com.