Nice dude, she is comin' together. The Honda looks tight, I would rock a '89 Accord, always liked those. FTW
I like the clean look over the clipper kit, it was a little over the top for my taste. I have a crossfire 10" sub in my van, same thing only 350W going to it and it doesn't even begin to wake it up. Keep us posted.:thumbup:
Thanks! Yeah, I wasn't crazy about the clipper at all either.. But at the time it beat having no bumper at all.. As much as I don't care for clippers, I
really don't like the bumperless look.. To me even if the car is "finished" it just looks unfinished or halfassed.. like the trend with flat black paint on everything..
Ok, back to progress...
I finally have a fully functioning dash! Here you can see the Passat B3 instrument cluster installed. As I think I mentioned, I did this because I got fed up with the finicky mechanical speedometers, or more specificly odometers.. If you can find one working, it probably won't work for long. This is a VR cluster, so its full electronic.. If I hook up some more wires I will also get MFA.
Other notable addition is the knee bar. It came out ok. It was really beat looking when I got it, from being in a cabby with a bad top for almost 20 years.. The vinyl had shrunk and was peeling. I wasn't able to locate another one, so I stripped the vinyl off and recovered it myself. It has some wrinkles in it, but damn its a challenging piece to cover with a bajillion curves. This is the first thing I vinyl wrapped in 10 years as well, and only the 2nd or 3rd thing in my entire life.. So Im pretty much a vinyl noob who started with an advanced project. But it looks better than it did..
My next vinyl project went better. That was the glove box door. The one that came with my dash was broken, and I have been riding around since October with no glove box door. So I took the one from the same car I got the knee bar. Again, the vinyl was shrunk and peeling. So we seperated the top of the glove box lid from its structure, stripped it and recovered it and glued it back together.
The center console is also a new addition, and it looks like crap I know. I was actually just test fitting it to see if it actually fit, since I wasn't sure if I got the knee bar in the right place. It needs to be removed and cleaned up real good.
For the past several weeks(except for losing a week on a work trip), I have been feverishly working on finishing up my sub box and amp rack. Continuing where I left off in my last post. I started working on the amp rack. Amps are a Rockford Fosgate 500X for mids and highs, and a JBL BP1200.1 for the subs..
Test fitting:
Finalized the location of the amps, made a spacer for the JBL since its a little shorter in height than the Rockford, and vinyl wrapped the top and the area above the sub.
Oodles of wires.. Amazing amount of wires for such a small truck LOL..
One thing you will notice is the vinyl on the pillar doesn't come down far enough. I stopped there because at that point it was getting very difficult to work the wrinkles out, and I also knew that the area between the amp rack and the sides of the cabs was going to be filled with speaker pods. Well, at this point I tried to design the pods, originally for a set of 6.5" seperates, then a set of 5.25" seperates. Problem is I only have just shy of 6" between the amp rack and cab wall, and theres not enough space to angle the speaker surface to get the distance.. All I know is I spent an entire day trying to make a template work, and I gave up...
Then as I was standing out there, I also remembered the rust below the back window that I didn't bother to fix when I was painting the truck(wanted to get it done and driving, and the bed is going to be rhino lined anyhow). Well, it occurred to me that whenever I finally get around to fixing the rust, the heat from the welding will most likely heat the glue for the vinyl, and ruin it.
SOOO, I said screw it. I ripped all the vinyl off the rear pillars, and switched gears back to body man..
After what seemed like forever(it was a long night), I finally got all the rust ground out, cut out the rusty areas, and welded new metal in..
After that, I can't beleive I didnt take more pictures. A TON of work went to getting to the next shot. The rear pillars were re-vinyl wrapped from the headliner area down to the sub enclosure. Then I made a filler panel that went from pillar to pillar across the top of the amp rack. Then I made plates to mount my seperates to the sides of the amp rack. The amp rack and its wiring had to be removed and reinstalled about 4 times to do this and make sure it all fit, and nothing didn't "quit working".
Finally making some progress, it was back to making more templates.
Everything from this point forward was last night after I got home from work. I didn't get anything I started the template in the next picture on Sunday, but came down with a upper respitory infection Sunday evening that knocked me out of commision until yesterday.
For those wondering how I was making the templates, I bought a bundle of chip board(really heavy weight paper), and I spray it with contact cement. Then piece by piece close in on the details. It ends up looking like a patchwork quilt when you are done, but its pretty much dead on if you take your time..
And the result of that patchwork quilt was a single piece of luan with a bunch of holes that had to line up with very small margin of error..
Result? IT FIT.. Fit first time no less.. No trimming no secondary cutting! I was pretty shocked myself.
After that, test fitting, I removed that final panel and vinyl wrapped it as well. I then put speaker grill cloth on the speaker holes. Its actually not perfect, but considering my experience level, I am definately very very pleased with how it looks!!
And as can be seen, I didn't waste any space behind the seat, LOL...
Finally, for those who haven't seen or heard one of these subs, they are downright amazing as I said before. I uploaded a vid to YouTube of the system playing Bass I Love You. The vid is in 720P HD, but I don't think the low frequency response of my cell phone's camera mic is very representative of the sound, haha.
The Sub In Action.. Not bad for a caddy!