My car audio install

ARe you attaching those to the door "card", I always tried to affix mine to the metal. hiding the fixings behind the driver or bolting in from the rear.

no criticism, just wondering.

I have some kit to fit in my tin top at some point but am having headunit and placement decision issues…

anyway the air has to go in first.

Hi Unityneil. Thanks for your post. The pods will be attached to the 7mm birch ply door cards from the rear with countersunk wood screws. The door cards themselves are held on with the poppers and door handle as per a standard door card but with the added help of some pond liner repair tape. This is that super sticky black butyl rubber stuff.. Fitted to the edge of the door card at the bottom near the driver, it bonds the door card to the inner skin of the door itself. This prevents the door card popping off when you close the door and also holds the driver and card as firmly as I am prepared to go. My initial design brief was to build a stereo without damaging the car whatsoever and so far this has been adhered to strictly. I'm not ruling out a more mechanical means of fixing the driver corner of the door card to the inner skin. But I will exhaust any other option first.

RichG60, I would consider selling the other pods, however, they took me days to make and £100 each to trim up.. That said, given the cost of the standard plastic ones second hand on ebay, I think the 6" pods would be a much better buy. You will get more bass than the plastic pods, but please bare in mind that this depends on lots of factors. The ability of the driver to play low, the ability of the door and card to play low (ie prevent any negative wave cancellation) the speaker cable, amp and head unit etc etc.. If you were going to fit these to a standard door card, you would have to dynomat the door and the rear of the door card and even then you will get a lot of negative wave cancellation. I made my door cards twice as thick and still struggled.. Don't get me wrong, they work well, but you need to understand the limitations of what you are fitting them to. People often ask "which speakers are best for my mk1 golf cabriolet?".. Well the answer isn't really as straight forward as that as the problem is the speaker box more than the driver itself. In this case the door and door card. So, as I have said before, its like saying, "which tyres are the best ones for a trip to the moon in my mk1 golf cabriolet?" Give me a call by all means and we can discuss audio and what you are trying to achieve and I will help you where I can.. 07861801582

Oldschoolcool, hopefully I will have the stereo built up again, set up and run in by the AGM. If I manage to get the days off work, I will be there. I put in for them months ago, so fingers crossed. If you go to the AGM and come and introduce yourself to me, I will give you a demo. If I can get these doors playing low, I am sure it will blow your mind. The set up on this takes at least a day and I don't mean randomly fiddling until I am happy it sounds well.. I mean scientifically pin point accurate.. What we do following the set up is then make adjustments to allow for the fact that it is a cabriolet when driving. But standing still, the sound is set as perfect and neutral as possible.

Unityneil said

ARe you attaching those to the door "card", I always tried to affix mine to the metal. hiding the fixings behind the driver or bolting in from the rear.

no criticism, just wondering.

I have some kit to fit in my tin top at some point but am having headunit and placement decision issues…

anyway the air has to go in first.

Been thinking long and hard about this Unityneil.. With the 6" drivers and pods, there was not too much weight or inertia caused by the drivers. So I think I got away with it pretty well using the more solid door cards, popper fixings and butyl pond liner repair tape bonding material.. All of which will also be utilised in the 8" driver set up.. However. I think you are right. I am going to have to use some kind of mechanical fixing.

I do like the screw from the back idea. I will see how much room I have and whether or not the inner door skin and pod line up at suitable locations. Failing that, I have bought some rivnuts and an installing tool so that I can if need be do a nice professional job of making permanent anchor points to bolt too from behind the driver itself. I may even use a combination of both if need be. But I just wanted to say that you got me thinking.. I knew in my heart that you were right.. I just don't like the idea of drilling holes in my pride and joy.. So its gotta be neat and tidy. I will keep you updated on the results.. Cheers..

Rivnuts are an amazing invention !! Used then to mount all my air ride sensors - which tool did you get Walt ?


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Just a cheap one off ebay.. Claims to be a professional tool. But I wont know how good it is until I try it. If it is rubbish I will just send it back and buy a more expensive one. I recently bought an Am-Tech heave duty rivet gun for £17 delivered. Amazing tool. If need be I will get the rivnut version of that. But for the few times I will use it, I am hoping this cheap one will be good enough for the job in hand.

Game on..

Looking good, how do they sound

Absolutely incredible!.. I've not set it up properly yet. I need to run them in for 100 hours or so first. But they are really really punchy and more to the point they play low. It sounded pretty good with the 6" drivers, but these really do take the sound to what I was aiming for when I first set out building this system. I'm really chuffed that I have no vibrations or buzzing. I was expecting a whole world of pain trying to prevent that. But it would seem I have been very very fortunate. I aimed to make the door cards secure what with riv nuts, bolts and pond liner repair tape.. But I didn't expect such awesome results. I am very pleased indeed.. 

Quick update on the rivnut gun for anyone interested. The cheap Dekton on I bought for £11 off ebay was totally garbage. I have since bought a US pro rivnut tool, again from ebay and I am much more impressed with this one. £25 but a high quality build.

Great install. Glad it's been revived as I couldn't find  it a while back. Very inspirational, gav

Brilliant work - they look awesome and it is good that the sound matches the visuals.

Cheers guys, its nice to get positive comments after so much hard work. The 8" seas lotus drivers are still running in. They are sounding better and better all the time. Cant wait to get the amp levels set properly and the timing adjusted. It should be breath taking then..

Ok, a quick update for anyone interested.. My last post was following the upgrade of the 6" speaker pods to 8".. As with most upgrades, they highlight limitations or weakness in other areas and as such I decided to also upgrade the mid range drivers and tweeters. I went for the Rainbow Profi 3.5" mid and the Morel Mt250 tweeter. The problem I had with this is that the Grille for the Rainbow driver is designed to help you fit it flush into a door panel. So I had to either leave the speaker without a grille or make one. So I chose to make one from the Morel mids that I replaced. It took some delicate fabrication but I think it looks great. Here are a few pics of that transformation..

Following this upgrade, I decided to go the whole hog and buy the Pioneer ODR Ipod interface so that I could play wav files from a memory stick rather than keep changing cd's all the time. As the name suggests, the ODR (Optical Digital Reference) system connects via an optical cable to prevent loss of information at the pre amplification stage. So I bought the unit, optical cable and Ipbus cable so that the head unit can talk to the media interface and show what is playing.

Hiding the ipod/media interface wasn't an issue, but having access to the memory stick would be. So I decided that I would use a good quality USB cable and fit it in a suitable blank in the dash. The obvious one for me was where the choke would have fitted had it had a manual choke. The blank seemed like a suitable size and in perfect position but when I removed it I realised that it wouldn't be as simple as just making a hole and fitting the cable through. My initial brief was not to damage the car in any way, so once I saw that there was only a small hole in the dash where the blank was held in place from behind by a screw, I almost gave up.. But.. With a fresh set of eyes the following day, this is what I managed to do.. I bought a second hand blank off ebay and modified it as per the following pics..

The result from the dash view is as follows..

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Following the speaker upgrades and USB upgrade to be able to play wav files, I decided that I would go through the whole system and rewire it all to ensure that everything was fused to competition standard. This in itself took three or four days, but it was worth it. Every time you change down the rating of the positive feed, you must fuse down accordingly at that point. So here are a few pics of what I added / tidied up along that way.

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In the last few days, I have finally got the system set up in its final configuration. My friend set it up for me using his Real Time Analyzer and the results are truly stunning. At last, after what must be 3 or 4 years of pushing for perfection, I think I am finally where I set out to be. So happy in fact that I have entered the car in the Europen Mobile Media Association (EMMA) competition on the 28th May 2017 at the Modified Nationals show. Having never competed, I am entering at entry level. So fingers crossed..