Front speaker question

You're working with a factory amp that has built in crossovers.  If you want to use these new speakers, you're best off to upgrade the headunit and bypass the factory amp. 

As I understand it now, you dropped in the new speakers in place of the old ones without using the new crossover.  Your new speakers have a lower impedence than the factory speakers (bad) and the new tweeters are trying to play what the 4" factory speakers were before (also bad).  You need to use the crossovers that came with your new speakers (unless you are going to design your own crossover network) which will require a "factorysystemectomy".

It's good to see you're upgrading the headunit.  They'll sound horrible if you try to series the new speakers, since the tweets will then be playing full range.  You could just install the mids in the doors with no tweets at all, but why not use the components to they're potential?

Just run new wires directly from the radio to the speakers.  Use the crossovers that came with the set, and it'll present a 4 ohm load to the deck.  Don't believe me- just wire mids and tweets to the crossovers on the kitchen table and test it with a meter.  You'll just have to find a place for the new crossovers.

Oh, and Lyle, it may sound like a lot of labor, but you can put that lucky son of yours to work since it's going in his car.  You can do one side while he does the other.  You bought him 3-way components?  Where were my parents when I bought my first car?

What I don't understand about your question in this thread is this:  why, if you are replacing both the deck and the speakers, are you concerned with what the original speaker wiring and impedance was in that car?

You asked twice:

Should I take one out and just run the better sounding ones?

Or just removed 1 speaker and run a single 4 ohm as I do not want to damage the HU.

That's exactly what you should do.  I'm assuming by "3-way" you are actually referring to a single speaker unit in a tri-axle configuration.  These will have little capacitors mounted under the tweeters to separate the highs, so in effect they have their own crossovers.  Your new deck will output into two channels at 4 ohms per channel (an assumption by what you have said here), so choose the better of what you bought for replacements and install them.  They should be in the door locations.  Leave the orig. dash locations out of the picture altogether.  An upgrade in the future should be an outboard amplifier for those speakers to clean up the sound, as the level of power you'll be getting from a deck will be in the range of 10 watts/channel.  And, the frequency range will be dramatically improved.

Any future posts on this subject should include makes and model #'s of the gear you are installing.

Build the box so that it performs well in the worst case scenario and, in return, it will reward you at all times.

That's funny- for some reason I thought I read the word components in there, and in doing so, may have thoroughly confused the poor guy.  Thanks for stepping in Steve.  I'm losing my touch- first Haemphyst proves to everybody that ol' Tom can't do basic math (14.3v-13.9v=.3v?), and now you prove that Tom is "seeing things" that aren't there.

Still, though, the best thing would be to run new wires from the deck to the speakers.