Covering tweeter pods with cloth

    In 2010 I started to create tweeter pods for my car. I really liked that black cloth called Alcantara which usually comes in Lamborghini or Audi RS series. So I thought - why couldn't I use it for my little project. When I saw the actual price for genuine Alcantara cloth I started to look for alternatives. Alcantara cloth costs about 160 $ per meter. :) Luckily I found alternative - cloth that is something similar to suede, so it looks almost as Alcantara. And it costs only 20$ per meter.

   I won't describe the steps needed to create customized tweeter pods from fiberglass since I already described it in my previous posts:
Tweeter pods: Step #1
Tweeter pods: Step #2
Tweeter pods: Step #3

   So in this post I'll write only about covering tweeter pods with cloth.

   The actual steps for applying this cloth is almost the same as in the given links above. The only thing that is different - I tried my luck in sewing.

   If you read my previous post you would already know that I'll be using two peaces of cloth which will be joined by sewing them right next to the tweeter. This is necessary because by applying only one peace there would be a lot of wrinkles.

   Since I didn't have sewing machine I tried my luck sewing by hand. I'll try to illustrate:

   In the picture above you can see how the sewing was done. The part that is in the picture vertically will be as the lower side so it won't be seen. The stitches won't be seen as well.

   It's important to put both cloth on the fiberglass trim (tweeter pod) and see that everything is ok. Than sew it together and only then glue it to the fiberglass trim. 

   Unfortunately I don't have pictures from the actual process. 

   I can only suggest to be very careful because it is very hard to sew and cut both peaces of cloth precisely. There will be wrinkles at first attempt. As you will see in the following pictures, I had wrinkles on the cloth also. Some day I'll reapply the fabric to get rid of the failures. 

   This time these tweeter pods didn't fit perfectly so I had to glue the original clips to the fiberglass trim.

Now the hardest thing was to understand - where to glue these clips. 

Clips look like this:

   In the following picture you can see the actual car front pillar and holes which are meant for the clips. 

   The next picture shows the back side of fiberglass pillar trim. 

    So how to find - where to glue the clips on the fiberglass trim?

   I used plasticine (molding clay). I put a lump of it on the back side of the trim approximately against the holes in the pillar.

   Then pressed the trim to the pillar in the position as it should be staying. Then took the trim of the pillar. In the best case, plasticine lump should stay on the fiberglass trim with a shape of the hole for clip. 

   I have illustrated it in the picture:

   The blue stuff in the picture is plasticine and the gray rectangle is shape that formed after pressing trim to the pillar. The black lines are drawn with marker so that when I remove the plasticine, I can see the place, where clip should be.

So that's it. 

Midrange speaker pods: step #2

   The doors at this point are packed with vibroisolation, so it's time to start creating pods.

Creating structure for pods is a creative thing. There are a lot of different solutions and types of construction. You just have to use imagination. It is only important that these pods would be stable, they wouldn't wobble around and they would be joined with the doors, so - construction should be rigid.

I used small wooden bricks as you will see in the pictures below.

    The first problem I encountered is that the door panel/trim is thick so speaker ring (wooden ring on which speaker will be attached) must be quite far from the door structure. Since I didn't had very long screws that would go from wooden speaker ring to the door structure I had to improvise. 

I'll try to sketch what I have done:

    This, of course, is not the best way to create distance between doors and speaker ring, but it did the trick for me. This construction was stable and rigid.
    To create the above construction first of all you have to cut a hole in the door panel where the pod will be. I cut the panel with jigsaw. The hole in panel is needed to measure what will be the distance between door structure and speaker ring. As you can see in the picture below, I have cut hole in the door panel and attached few wooden bricks (not enough).

    After attaching few extra wooden bricks until appropriate distance has been achieved, speaker ring has to be attached.
    The speaker ring should be placed in such angle that speaker would point to the gearbox leaver.

    Next step is to cover this construction with vibroisolation so it would be hermetical (keep in mind that it is impossible to make it airtight - just do your best).

    Then attach the speaker (don't forget to connect the wires... :) ).

   It would be best to apply some silicone between wooden ring and speaker (if the speaker doesn't have rubber ring).

    

In addition I would suggest to put some cloth between doors and door panel. Because panel is made from plastics and the aluminum foil is not very elastic. Since this speaker will produce a lot of vibration, layer of cloth between door and its panel will reduce additional unwanted noises. 

   At this point I haven't created decorative trim for the pods. I'll try to work on them this summer using fiberglass. This will be very difficult task, but interesting and useful.

Midrange speaker pods: step #1

    When I started to upgrade my car audio system, one of the most important part was speakers. Every normal sound system has at least two-component frontal speaker system. By default, midrange speakers are placed in doors (near legs) and tweeters (high frequency speakers) are placed on the front panel or in the upper part of the doors. As you might seen, I have already posted 3 steps on how to create tweeter pods in front pillar trims so that tweeters would be higher than built-in factory tweeters. This time I'll describe how I created midrange speaker pods in my front doors. 

   Audi I own, has original 13cm speakers in doors which were not enough for my system. The most popular speaker size for audio fans is 16.5 cm. These speakers are bigger and able to produce more bass frequency, are louder and more powerful.  

   So the goal is - 16.5cm speakers. As I said that original space allows to setup only 13 cm speakers, so it is necessary to make modifications in the door trim/panel. Before you do this you must understand that this will ruin your original looks of the car interior. But you have to make sacrifices in the name of high quality music in your car.

   The first step is to disassemble the door trim/panel and soundproof the inside of the door. It is very important, because bigger and more powerful speakers produce bigger vibrations. Doors are made of quite thin metal so they tend to resonate creating unnecessary additional sounds. Also from vibrations door metal moves forwards and backwards, so the volume of doors are changing (not much, but still) and it distorts the sound.

I used vibroisolation material that can be bought in specialized car audio stores. Vibroisolation roughly consists of bitumen layer and thin aluminum foil layer. This vibroisolation is quite heavy as its purpose is to make door metal heavier = harder to move.

In the following picture you can see how I isolated my front door from inside:

   This particular isolation material is easy to apply, you just have to peal of the paper which protects the adhesive side and stick it to the metal.

   As you see in the picture above, I have attached plywood form that will support the construction of the speaker pod. This is necessary to have a surface to which I can attach pod construction. 

Preferably metal would be used instead of plywood, because the inside of the doors gets moist in bad weather so wood can rot in these conditions. However, I have these pods installed for about 2 years know and everything is OK. If you use wood, it would be best to apply a coat of protective paint.

   I think everyone knows that speakers can work only in boxes. Well, they CAN work without boxes, but they sound really crappy without boxes. As for midrange speakers, they are made for approximate volumes that usually car doors have. As you should know, the best box for speakers is hermetical. Unfortunately we can't make doors hermetic but we can do our best. So I applied vibroisolation for the outer side of doors (much more sense will occur after looking at the picture below). Don't forget to cut small holes for the wires!

Next posts will follow!

How to get a broken tip of 3.5mm jack connector from female plug?

     A while ago I had very unfortunate problem. I found out that the tip of my headphone connector (jack 3.5mm) had broken and stayed within laptop "female" connector.
Since there is a small pin that fixates jack within female connector, I couldn't get it out just by shaking my laptop.
You can see rough sketch of the broken connector pin:

   So how to get it out? I first disassembled my laptop trying to get to the connector from within. Unfortunately that connector was fully enclosed so I was not able to get to the broken pin. 

Since usage of headphones/external speakers is crucial for me, I started to think of other ways to do this. 

   Than I had an idea which actually worked.

What to do?

   You have to take about 6 cm of a wire, take of the isolation and solder its tip so it would be covered in tin.

       After this take your pliers and soldering iron. In one hand take your pliers and grab a hold (with the pliers) of the wire. Than put it in the "female" connector so that it would touch the broken tip of the jack connector. Then take your soldering iron in other hand and put it against wire between "female" connector and pliers. Wait for a while. Holding your soldering iron against wire will eventually heat up the wire to the temperature when tin will melt. As it melts, it will solder the wire together with the broken tip of jack connector.

    After a while try to take off the soldering iron and wait for few seconds. Tin will harden and you will be able to pull out the broken tip with your wire.

Tweeter pods: Step #3

If you follow this project you should already read these posts:
   Tweeter pods: Step #1
   Tweeter pods: Step #2

    In recent blog posts I described how to make fiberglass front pillar trim with tweeter pods.

    At this point the trim is ready to cover it with leather or cloth. In this project I used artificial leather in cream color (since the interior for the car I'm building this project is white/cream color. In next posts I'll show pictures of pillar trim for my car which I covered with black alcantara-like cloth. 

   Since this project has the tweeters in almost 90 degree angle to the trim, there were problems applying the leather. You see, the more irregular shape is the trim the harder it is to put on cloth without wrinkling. 

  The shape of this trim is extra difficult so I had to apply two parts of leather. Two leather pieces should be put together at the corner of tweeter and trim (you'll understand it in the next pictures). The best way to join both pieces of leather is by sewing. Unfortunately it requires great skill and sewing machine. And a lot of testing, experimenting and failing. :)

   In this project I tried to join them as close as possible to get rid of the gap between both pieces of leather. 

I failed, but got great experience on how to do that in my next projects. Soon I will reapply leather pieces with sewing stitches for these pillar trims. Something similar to the picture:

   OK, so to attach leather to the trim I used glue. I can't find the name of the glue, but it looks like honey, it can dry fast and can glue leather, wood, plastics, metal, glass etc.

   So I cut out approximate shape of the leather cloth so it would overlap the edges of the trim (so I would be able to bend it around the trim edges afterwards. 

   Apply glue to the trim surface and to the leather. Then allow it to soak for 3-5 minutes and put the leather on the trim surface. It will glue almost instantly, so be precise and careful. Also try to get rid of the air bubbles underneath the leather. Don't apply the glue to all the leather and trim, try to take several steps to not mess it up at once. 

    The difficult part starts at the tweeter post angles. I can't really explain how did I do it. I used razor blade to cut the leather. You can see in pictures beneath that there are lot of flaws, but it was the best I can do at that moment. 

   After this drill hole in the trim, so tweeter wire would fit. 

   The next difficult thing is - how to attach clips so that trim would clip on to the pillar. 

   At this project I didn't attach clips because this fiberglass trim fitted perfectly in the car and didn't make any gaps between trim and pillar. 

   In my other project I glued the clips on the back to the fiberglass trim so it could be attached to the pillar. But more on that in my future posts. 

   So the result in car looks like this:

Tweeter pods: step #2

     Next step of making tweeter pods is to level the surface using filler. The filler must be intended for car repairs, because it is very resistant and it stays on the fiberglass. The car filler also has two components, so proportions of hardener should be read on the car filler label.

     I won't teach you how to apply filler, because that skill comes with lot of training. At the following pictures I only started to learn my way of applying filler. The idea is simple - you put on filler on the fiberglass trim that we created in the last blog post. When it has hardened enough, you have to use sandpaper to get rid of unevenness. I should add that the surface of the fiberglass trim should be smooth although if there are small dents don't bother - when cloth/leather will be applied afterwards, these dents won't be seen.
So this is what the fiberglass trim looks after applying filler:

     And after sanding:

      By now you should understand that when using sandpaper, wear respirator, because the dust from fiberglass and car filler can be bad for your health. And this is not bullshit. Small glass particles can stay in you lungs for a very long time if not even forever.


      Now starts the most difficult part - getting the angle of tweeter. 
This is how I did it:
1. Place the fiberglass trim in to car so it would fit as original. Then place tweeter in the chosen height and place a mark on the trim where tweeter should be. At this point it is important only to get the height (we will have tweeters at eye-sight level).
2. You should find appropriate back cover for tweeters. Usually they come together in the speaker kit. So you have to get cover that would be suitable for placing within a surface. Let me give an example:


This is NO NO, because with this back cover tweeters can be placed on car panel:

This is the thing were looking for:

3. You have to find some peace of PVC pipe or similar to work as a form for tweeter. The most difficult part is finding pipe that would have the necessary diameter. 

Let me illustrate why the PVC, and how to measure correct size:

     As you see from picture, the PVC pipe diameter should be enough to include not only tweeter size, but also decorative leather/cloth thickness. 

    When the necessary PVC pipe has been found you should cut off about 3 cm (approx the height of tweeter itself). Afterwards you should attach it at the marked point on your fiberglass trim. How to attach it? I used rivets. But it was only because it was OK for me. In other cases there might be too little space between inner diameter of PVC pipe and fiberglass trim to put in tweeter.

4. Now about getting the right angle for the tweeters. At this point you should already know in what angle tweeters should point in your car. So now take some kind of wire (I used copper). Attach it to the PVC ring from behind (drill a small hole in PVC). This wire will be used to lean the PVC pipe in the correct angle and then attaching the other end of the wire on the fiberglass trim. 

Like this:

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of it, but in the next pictures you will be able to understand it.

5. When the angle has been adjusted, you have to get lady tights. They are made of nylon and are very stretchy. So when we apply them over our construction, natural smooth curves and lines appear.

      Try to fixate the tights in place with some duck tape. After that apply polyester resin (glue) on the tights, than apply fiberglass (preferably small squares) and don't press hard because you can ruin the shape.

       When glue has hardened, cut off the unnecessary parts of the tights as you see in picture above. 

Then it's time to apply car filler again. And sanding.... And filling..... And sanding...

New updates will follow...

Tweeter pods: step #1

     My goal with this project - customized fiberglass tweeter pods in front pillars.

     I would like to mention that this was my first project with fiberglass, so the result could be better. Training leads to perfection.

     So where to start? As every project - planing is crucial. It is important to know at least basics of car audio setups. Since every tweeter is different not only by dimensions but by sound characteristics, the best way to decide of the tweeter position is by experimenting. To do this you have to get some help. So when your car stereo is running, you have to hold tweeter in one of your hand (other person holds the other tweeter) and try to rotate it, change its location, position, angle etc. This way you can listen and decide in which position the tweeter sounds best. So - there isn't the "correct" position. Only the one you like best.

At this project I was making pods for my brothers car and audio system. He has car stereo with sound processor which is able to create sound delays (to create better sound stage and stereo imaging), so we decided that with the processor in place the best sound from tweeters are when they are at eyesight level pointing to the driver.

Motorized gadget: step #5

       So I got to the part of fixing iPhone to the motorized vent.

      This was quite a challenge because the phone has to be placed in perfect center or otherwise the system won't be able to rotate. Secondly to fixate screws and nuts, you have to be jeweller (that's why I used rivets instead).

So first I attached some aluminum ribs so I would be able to attach iPhone cover to the moving part.

        Next I drilled holes in the iPhone cover, that would match the holes on the aluminum ribs beneath. 

After riveting iPhone cover to the aluminum ribs, I had to ensure that vent system can rotate 180 degrees. It couldn't... That's why there are several unnecessary holes in the iPhone cover. :)

        So this works for now as you can see in the video below:

 Unfortunately there are additional problems that I have to solve. 

1. How to connect iPhone wires so that they would allow to move the center part.

2. How to disguise the vent so that it when iPhone can be seen, no other stuff is visible (like the center axis).

Motorized gadget: step #4

       In the previous blog posts I got trough with the main problems in circuits that control servo.

If you missed them:
Step #1: Voltage limiter from 12 to 5 V
Step #2: NE555 timer for servo control
Step #3: Problem solving with oscilloscope

      With the circuits working I had to proceed with the next phase - integration in the car panel.

      So the idea is to use the center console air vents from my car. Since I don't use these vents, I decided to sacrifice them in the name of my project.

      I took out the center part witch consisted of three separate parts. The best thing with these vents is that they are cylindrical, so they can be rolled 180 degrees. 

      At first I took the vent system apart:

        I had to modify these vents, so they could turn fully around. With a bit of pliers, knife and drill I got rid of small things that didn't allow the vents to move around.

Motorized gadget: step #3

OK, so I got trough the previous problems.

       First of all I applied heat sink to the transistor to cool it down. It's much better now, but still the heat sink is a bit warmer than it should be. Maybe some little fan will be attached. Since the heat sink doesn't get hot all the time I will proceed observing this process. For transistor cooling I used old heat sink from CPU and also applied special paste that would better distribute heat between transistor and heat sink. 

    About the second problem (described in last blog post) - I borrowed oscilloscope to see what is happening with the pulse signal that should control the servo.

    To see how the circuit works at first I didn't add the control current - power supply that produces current from 0-10V.

These are the results:

1. Potentiometer in the center position (on NE555 timer pin #5 current is 1.6V):

As you can see pulse signal is normal, nothing unusual.

Motorized gadget: step #2

      It's time for the next step. As I mentioned before, I want to create scheme/mechanism that would be able to control servo based on the current in car stereo remote wire (intended to switch on/off audio amplifier). 

To understand it better - when I switch on car stereo it gives current on the remote wire, which "says" to the amplifier: "Switch ON!". Scheme "sees" the current in remote wire and starts turning servo to the other end (180 degrees) that flips a panel in center console of the car. When car stereo is switched off, current in remote wire is gone and scheme turns servo the other way around (180 degrees back). 

To do this I encountered two main problems:

   1. Scheme and servo had to receive 5 V all the time.

   2. To control servo it has to receive pulse signal through control wire.

    

     The first problem solving is described in my recent blog post. I created scheme that can reduce voltage from 12 V (which is commonly found in car) to 5 V. The voltage can be adjusted with potentiometer. Scheme works well although, transistor gets very hot. Heat sink will be applied soon to cool it down.

      Information how to solve my second problem I found in the internet. But before that I'll try to explain about the basics of servo performance. Servo has three wires - plus, ground and control. To the plus wire 5V current has to be applied from the scheme that I created in the previous blog post. The fun starts with the control wire. To move servo, pulse signal has to be transmitted. If the pulse signal is 1 ms (approx. 80Hz) the servo will turn fully left, if the signal is 2 ms (approx. 80 Hz) the servo will turn fully right.

Motorized gadget: step #1

     Since I love technical stuff, I have many different ideas in my mind. Mostly they are useless but fun to create, plan and integrate.

     This time I couldn't let go of an idea about motorized panel in my car that would turn 180 degrees when car stereo is switched on. The panel should turn back 180 degrees when car stereo is switched off.  

A lot to do till then, but for now - I'm proud to say that I have finished the first phase!

Since motorization will be done by a servo which uses 5 V current, I encountered my first problem - where to find 5 V in my car?

     My father drew scheme that should convert 12 V to 5 V. With a list of needed components I went to my local radioshack. Few decades ago my father was a radio engineer so many components were already meticulously sorted in small boxes. 

So the scheme: