Billthe3's 951 Stereo Project
Page 3: crossovers and front sixes
| So as I said on the last page, I was quite glad when I realized there was so much room under the dash to use for mounting the crossovers. This pic shows where I drilled holes in the dash structure to mount my crossover jig. |
| Here is the jig I built to hold the 4 crossovers. There are 2 per side of the car (4 total) because I'm running a 3 component setup on each side. The larger crossover splits the signal between lows for the 6" and highs for the second crossover, which then splits highs and lows again for the 4" and tweeter. |
| Here the crossovers are sitting in the car all wired up ready to be mounted up into the dash. This is why I ran my own wires. |
| The crossovers all mounted up under the dash. The compilation/split picture is there to show where all the wires go. |
| I was quite excited when I finally got the crossovers in place, because feeding the two bolts to mount the jig were quite a pain because of where they were located. Of course I was pretty pissed off when I figured out that I could not mount the air conditioning duct back into place with the crossovers installed, so I had to pull them back out to install the duct. The dash was also having a war with my knuckles. Much cursing was involved in this part. |
| I didn't want to have the 6" speakers just mounted on a sheet of wood under the dash, so I built them some boxes. I was originally going to go as shown in the third picture, but then decided to go ahead and get the grilles for them. Having people kick the speakers probably wouldn't help them last a long time. The grilles ended up covering up some of my bad jig-saw cutting job for the speakers holes as well, so I'm glad I got them. The final boxes actually look pretty sweet, though the sound isn't too great. I think I'm going to go back and drill out some ports in the boxes to hopefully stop them from echoing so much. |
| Here is the passenger side speaker mounted. |
| Here you can see the brackets that hold the speaker and box in place. The brackets are all attached on bolts and studs that were already present, so its all removable if I want to later. The way I had it mounted in the first picture was too low, so I went back and redid the front bracket to raise the speaker up as shown in the third picture. When it was low you could see it hanging under the dash, which I did not want. Gotta keep the stock look going. |
| Of course the speaker box was now where the glovebox goes, so I had to modify that. Thanks to ebay I've been cutting up spares and keeping all my original stuff. But for cutting this I used the jigsaw to cut all the lines and then heated up where I was going to bend the plastic with a propane torch. It was rather easy, though the insulator fabric liked to catch fire, and it stunk like hell. I used the pieces I trimmed off for the original bends to fill in the holes in the interior part. |
| Now you see the speaker, now you don't! Its magic! I was rather glad to find out that the new glovebox is the exact width of the owners manual holder I got on ebay a while back. Bonus points for me for unintentionally making it fit the document holder perfectly. |
| A shot of the pieced together interior. Barely noticable, unless you are spending a lot of time digging around in the glovebox. |
| Showing how well the glovebox and speaker box fit together. Considering I spent maybe 20seconds measuring and guestimating, this fits perfectly. I don't think it could have worked out any better. |
| Looking up through the glovebox at the crossovers. If they start getting to hot with use I'll add some little computer fans up there to keep them cool. I'm hoping that the a/c ducting will keep them cool enough though. |
| The driver side 6" speaker mounted up under the dash. Quite the rats nest of wires I've now got running under there. Hurray for zipties. |
| One of the brackets for the driver side speaker. I used the bolt on the steering column support to mount it. |
| The other bracket for the driver side speaker. I connected this bracket with the bolt used to hold on the cruise control computer box. |
