Reaper fX4

I bought a radio for my 03 f150 and a wiring harness to "simplify" things i matched all the wires from the harness to the aftermarket then dash lights went out fixed the fuse but radio still wont work.Too i have 3 wires that match nothing i have the illumination wire (orange/white stripe) and two solid black im guessing one is an extra ground but im unsure any sugestion?Oh its a jvc radio from wal-mart

ford mann

well im not a pro at electrical wiring but i think the illumination wire you were talking about having extra is supposed to be hooked to the dash light that are then hooked to the dimmer roller so you can dim the back lighting maybe the radio needs that for power? or make sure that all your ground wires are good even try grounding the extra one. tell me if you figured it out or tried it

Reaper fX4

not a radion man so dont know where the dimmer is never messed with it and the other black wires are too short to ground and i dont wont to splice them into the big one and risk messing it up

$pitt04fx4

Make sure the radio is ground good...extra blk wires sounds wrong! If u have a bad ground or no ground the radio won't work....I would find a way to identify all the wires on ur harness..if u can't figure out what the harness wires r ur not at the point to connect any of them...plus diconnect the batt. when doing any work on wiring! If I were u I would start with knowing what wires r power and ground because of ur specific problem....try call the maufacture of the harness to find out the color codes for the wiring....Good Luck!

Reaper fX4

Where would you recomend grounding the wire at i cant find and good spots i found a matel bracket and nut and out the wire there.

$pitt04fx4

Ther should be a factory ground wire on the harness that connects to the head unit, that is usually the way to do it, or u can ground to any part of the body in the cab as close as possible to the head unit. If u ground to the body in the cab remove the paint down to bare metal ( try some sand paper or whatever u can get ur hands on to completely remove the paint ) and use a metal screw. I have never found great luck using exsisting bolt on the truck. I have my amps grounded to my body in the cab and it's solid! My head unit is grounded to factory ground in the harness and my extra components for my head unit like bluetooth, ipod, gps module r grounded to the body near the head unit and it's never had a issue!

Reaper fX4

ok ill give it a shot and let you know

Triton-SAS

Your power wire if u have an adapter on there should be yellow for constant red for key on power black is ground orange wire shouldn't need to be hooked up and hook up all the speakers and plug in the antenna other than that most others don't need to be messed with. Can't remember bout the blue wires. One send power to an amp and the other blue is for power antenna. Just don't remember which is which

scythefwd

Look up the radio wiring online by model number. Then look up the ford plug wiring diagrams on line. Match those. Color to color sometimes works... sometimes not.

GottaSCrew

On the 03' you should be using the harness metra #70-1771. On that harness there is a solid black wire and a black with a small white line. The solid black wire is for the ground(-) and the black with white wire is for the factory amp ground. When doing most ford installs I wil usually connect both the factory ground and the amp ground to ensure that everything is properly grounded. As far as your illumination wires, that is completely up to you, all it controls is the backlighting of the aftermarket radio ( I usually never hook them up unless a customer asks me to). Hope this helps.