8" Sub in Rear Deck, Pictures Inside! Options

[Coomer]

Lately I've been working on the car a lot, and I figured that while it's all apart for the bodywork I might as well work on some other stuff on the car. One project I've wanted to do for a long time was put an 8" sub in the rear deck. My reasoning for this includes the fact that I have a new trunk lid with no sound deadener and I want more usable space in my trunk.

My first step was to decide on a sub. After reading some reviews and such, I decided on a Dayton Quatro 8" SVC sub, which is on sale now at Parts Express and came out to about $50 shipped. It's totally not a bling-bling sub but supposedly sounded excellent for the price from what I'd read.





Once the plain-looking sub arrived (in a matching plain white box,) I made a cardboard circle the size of the sub, marked where I wanted it in the car, and then cut the hole in the rear deck with my Sawzall.



Once the hole was cut, I test fit a MDF ring that I made in the car, and began constructing the wood part of the enclosure out of .75" MDF. MDF is used for four of the walls of the sub enclosure (bottom, left, right, and rear) and the ring that holds the sub in. I used this flexible metal stuff with holes in it (can't remember what it's called) and screws to mount the ring to the rest of the box.



The next step was to lay some fiberglass down. Most people would want to stretch fleece over the exposed area and soak it in resin. Since my fiberglass will not be visible and doesn't need to look nice, I decided to simply lay sections of fiberglass over the wood frame. At 100 degrees, fiberglass resin dries very quickly. Using about 75% of the hardener called for, my first batch of resin dried in a matter of about three minutes after mixing. I went through several quick batches, finally using about 30% of the hardener (so about 4 drops per ounce instead of 14) that the container called for to get a suitable working time.

I put five layers of a mixture of mat and cloth on the enclosure over the course of a couple hours. It's important to sand down rough and high spots in between layers so that you don't get air bubbles (aka weak spots) in your enclosure.





I then quit for the day. On day two, I sanded down the rough edges and mounting ring of the enclosure. I test fitted it into the car, increased the size of the hole in the car a bit, and then shot the enclosure with a quick couple layers of spray paint. I then put in bolts for speaker wire connections, and attached three L-brackets to hold the enclosure into the rear deck of the car.

Once this was done, it was time to mount the sub. I put in my polyfill, wired up the sub, put rubber weather stripping on the ring, and mounted the sub in the enclosure.



The final step was to mount the enclosure in the car. I'd already drilled holes in the rear deck for the brackets to mount to, so it was simply a matter of bolting the enclosure in. Once in, I mounted my amp to the underside of the rear deck with a couple Torx-head bolts thrown in to throw off thieves, wired everything up, and put everything back together. I still have to fabricate a new rear deck out of wood and speaker grill cloth material, but the hard part is done, and only took a few hours spread out over two days.







The sub sounds great, but the rear deck rattles a bit at high volumes. I'm thinking that if I use rubber spacers in between the mounting brackets and the rear deck and more dynamat on the edges of the hole, I could get rid of some of the rattles. I'll have to try this at some point. Also, I added a 3.5mm auxiliary stereo jack to my center console, which is hooked up to my head unit. This allows me to hook up my MP3 player, friends' iPods, etc. very easily, and it's pretty well hidden and subtle. I figured you guys might want to see this as well.



Let me know what you think.

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[brthrurik]

your glass work is awesome, but with that percentage hardener you may blow it apart. The stereo plug port in the console is great and helped me decide what i will do with my ipod dock... can't wait to see the car finished!

[Coomer]

I don't think it will blow apart. It cured really hard and was solid enough for me to put a ton of pressure on it.

[jess_i_74]

Clean. I hope you don't fry your amp by mounting it upside down; it may need some more ventilation, and that way heat is trapped in it. But deterring thieves is a very good thing, especially considering how many times your Celi has been trashed.

[Niskyspy]

It's really hard to blow up fiberglass. When I was making my kick panels which consisted of 6 layers of fiberglass. I added prolly 50 times more hardener then specified in the directions. So every layer hardened in about 15-20min. I did this because I hate working with fiberglass and I wanted to finish as fast as possible.

[115celi]

looks great, can't wait to see completed.

[Bigmeanbulldog55]

I kept looking at that thinking, "were in the heck is he doing that at?" Then I happend to remember that you have a coupe. Looks pretty good right now. I hope it sounds good.

[hashmaster52]

is that a jbl1200.1 amp? thats wut i have for my 12" kicker solobaric. looks good.

[Coomer]

is that a jbl1200.1 amp? thats wut i have for my 12" kicker solobaric. looks good.

It's actually a BP300.1. Same line, just smaller and less powerful. Great amp though...I've had it for years and it's never let me down. We'll hope that the vibration and lack of much ventilation doesn't kill it.

I fixed the main source of the rattles today too. One of the black plastic pieces that face the back of the rear seats was hitting the sub enclosure, causing rattles. A strip of Peel and Seal sound deadener solved that rattle.

[MaskedMan]

wow i am really amazed coomer. it looks really nice