Well thing is the door wires are not soaking in WD40, but anyway it will be interesting to see what you find... Not sure it will have any relevance to "real life" though. Keep in mind that the wires would have to lose insulation at nearly the same point and then make "contact" - the whole thing is wrapped in rubber so there is little chance of accidental shorting to the chassis.

And you already cleaned it as best you could with a paper towel right? So what else is there to do?

I mean worse come to worse and your door controls stop working, you'll likely just have to replace that wire bundle (and redrill the molex plugs and refeed the speaker wire). A pain in the a$$ maybe but not the end of the world... And it ain't gonna happen in the next 10 years - promise!

 

Actually, to test insulation values on a conductor you need to do a stress test with a meggar.
Visually you will see no difference, but the insulating value will degrade.

A meggar measures how much voltage it takes to pass a current through the insulation to ground.

Please understand...
I don't think you have anything to worry about.
I just wanted to point out there are better alternatives to WD-40.

Also..
"WD-40 evaporates...."
Only the carrier evaporates, there are still residuals.

 

i see... so the insulation will not melt away or anything.. thanx for the explanation.

 

The tendency for voltage to overcome insulation (degraded or intact) is a direct function of the voltage (as you imply with your explanation of the meggar analysis tool). The wires in the door are at most 14V, right? At this low voltage, I would think just the physical presence of the plastic keeping the metal apart a fraction of an inch would be good enough, degraded or otherwise. I don't think "arcing" would be an issue at all.

My understanding was that the WD40 could actually dissolve plastic, rubber, glue, etc. but that this was a direct effect of the solvent, which evaporates leaving a gummy residue that repels water (but is not a solvent). Who knows? I've never actually tried using it for that...

 

I saw your pics of your system..... is the 250/1 jl amp enough power for the sub. I have the 300/4 for the other speakers like you, smae box but a 10w6 JL will the 250/1 push a w6. What do you think????

E.mail me.................. r_madrid@sbcglobal.net

 

i also managed to run 12 gauge into each of my doors if anyone has some questions feel free to ask.

 

It was a BITCH. I followed 4080's instructions and was able to do it, took me a few hours. The hard part is putting the plugs back in the door jams, then plugging htem back together. Pushing them together causes the inside one to keep snapping back out. It looks great though. I ran 2 14 gauge wires in each door.

 

I see no reason to run new speaker wire around to anything but a new sub in the back.

 

There are people like you and people like us (audiophiles), that will always disagree on these things.

 

People like you will have to make a good argument for people like me (electrical engineers) to believe that it makes a noticeable difference. If anything you're probably starting to degrade your audio with higher wire capacitances. What are the stock wire characteristics and how do they compare to what you swapped in? What sort of peak / average currents are you running to the speakers? What's the theoretical resulting difference in output? How does that compare to your physical ability to hear?

 

Ummm, yeah. I started this thread and went through the headache. It was NOT worth it. I have speakers capable of handling 150W RMS and an amp that puts out over 100W per channel. That was my justification.

I have the gain on that amp turned up only 1/4 of the way and it's plenty loud enough for me. So what - that's 25 W?

14 gauge vs stock 22 gauge. I don't think it'd make any audible difference. Now I did run twisted pair - not sure if that help reduce interference, cause I didn't ever have any to begin with.

Bottom line - unless you have time to kill - pass this up. I doubt I will ever do it again.

 

there is another reason..........bi-amp the front sound stage