Edsers 1996 GT Project, Car still in hibernation years later! Options

[Edser]

My names Ed, and I live in Barcelona, Spain. I am from the Republic of Ireland. I've been living here for 13 years. In that time I've had a number of cars.

First one I got a year after arrival was a '93 Prelude 2.2 vtec. After that I got a '00 BMW 318ci. I sold that to get back into university.
So now I've got this 1996 GT. Its covered in dents and scrapes. Pretty tired looking. I want to make it look like new, improve it where I can and try to keep it as standard as possible. I'll be painting it black, and keeping the wheels as they are, just tarting them up a bit.
All of this depends on my finances of course, so it'll be a slow process. Patience will be required. Lots of patience.



















This post has been edited by Edser: Jul 21, 2022 - 5:58 PM

[Edser]

Today I fitted the new subwoofer.
It's the Pioneer TS WX610A.
It's designed to fit into the spare wheel so as not to take up boot space.
It took me about 3 hours to install, however I didn't install the volume/gain control thingymebob as I haven't decided exactly where to put it. I just fed the wire under the backseat temporarily.

First I trial fitted the sub into the cavity in the spare wheel. The main problem here is that the wheel is facing upwards and when you face it downwards the wheel doesn't fully sit down on the floor, but sits a centimeter or 2 above due to the hump in the middle of the floor fixture. So I'll need to make some spacers. Temporarily I put the cars emergency triangles under the wheel to support it. I guess I'll make some blocks out of thick packing foam, but for the moment it'll do.The wheel does sit slightly higher now, but it is not noticable, especially since the carpet never fitted well before, so now it looks the same as always. I used the various adapters that came with the kit as the original attachment bar was a little short once the wheel was flipped.


The wooden cover locks tightly over the wheel as before. I think I'll replace this with something better at a later stage.



Then I passed the yellow power cable through a hole in the bulkhead and under the skuff plates on the drivers side. Here I discovered a handy channel alongside all of the other cables. I then passed it under the edge of the rear door cards by the door pillar, and then under the rear seat and into the boot. In this way I didn't have to remove the interior panels. A big time saver.
I tied the yellow cable with cable ties in the engine bay, trying to keep it hidden as much as possible. This cable comes with a fuse already so its a very simple install. Just connect everything else and then this to the positive terminal at the end.




Then I ran the RCA and blue ON/OFF wire along the passenger side, hiding it under the skuff plate in the existing channel. As on the other side, I removed the same corner panels under the dash and ran the wires under the glovebox.



Then I whipped out the main console, and passed the RCAs through the dash and plugged them into the back of the cd player in the slots marked sub out. The blue control cable wasn't clear initially, but then I spotted it with a connector just like the one from the subwoofer. Easy!

So I popped the console back in and focused on the earth cable in the boot. I found two holes in the floor of the boot that had once held something... I dunno. So I cleaned up one and screwed the earth cable to it. All left to do was run the Volume /gain cable back under the rear seat. The Volume/gain controller is a nice piece of kit, with a little blue LED to tell you its on, and two nobs to adjust the bass to your preference.


Then I finally connected the power cable to the positive terminal of the battery, and hey presto! A thumping loud stereo and totally hidden!
Looks like a normal boot, no big boxes, nothing, and the bass is really surprisingly loud! I think it's made me a bit more deaf. Still worth it though.



Car is a really filthy inside. I have never cleaned it since I bought it 3 years ago. I may clean it one of these days. Maybe in the summer.

Here's a video showing the system in action. The video quality sucks a bit as my memory card is very bad and causes errors, but the sound is pretty awesome I think. I'll be changing the head unit for a double DIN later and uprating the speakers and adding some tweeters too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uiKbIVjnEo
I fixed the video. For some reason it was set to private. no clue why.

This post has been edited by Edser: Jan 10, 2015 - 9:39 PM