In this post I will describe steps that I have done to build cover-ups for midbass speakers in my car. Here you can see how I made midbass speaker pods in the front doors of my car. As you can see, these pods look awful although they are very useful for any car audio installation. In this post I'll try to make them less ugly not to say "good looking". :)
Since I have some minor experience working with fiberglass, it was decided, that the covers for pods will be made out of fiberglass because you can get whatever forms you like. The technology or the way to make them can be very different. It depends on the door trim itself, your skills and desire to ruin few days of your life. Different styles can bee seen on the Internet. If you want to have interior of the car as original as it could be, it is possible to have the pods be built in the door trim so it looks like factory made. It requires a lot of skills, material and fabrics selection etc.
I went the easy way.
The first step is to take food film, fold it in several layers and attach that film over the speaker pod. You should align the film on every curve and edge of the pod. The film it self can be fixated with some paper tape or something that wouldn't allow the film to move out of the correct position. This is done to protect the door trim from resin that will be used to glue fiberglass while replicating curves and form of the pod.
Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of this process. But I think you get the idea. Be extra careful to cover all of the pod and its surroundings, because if the resin (glue) will touch the door trim, you won't be able to clean it off.
The next step is to apply glue (resin) and fiberglass squares so you would have fiberglass form of the speaker pod. I have described in details how to handle fiberglass and resin, so I won't do it again. You can look for older posts in this blog. If you are very talanted, you might apply fiberglass with one try and get the perfect form. I wasn't, so I was prepared to apply another layer of fiberglass afterwards.
After few hours or minutes (depending on the proportions of resin vs hardener) you can peal off the food film with fiberglass cover and cut off the excess fiberglass.
This is how it looked for me:
As you can see, it is far from perfect. But with the next layers of fiberglass I made the form to look as it should be (in my opinion).
After I got the form right, it was time to cover it with cloth.
I chose Alcantara "wannabe" cloth (something like suede).
In this step I will not go in to details as it is described in my previous posts (Tweeter podiums).
The only difference is with the stitching where cloth made wrinkles. Covering tweeter pods I sew cloth peaces together. This time I used only glue. And it turned out better then I suspected.
I chose Alcantara "wannabe" cloth (something like suede).
In this step I will not go in to details as it is described in my previous posts (Tweeter podiums).
The only difference is with the stitching where cloth made wrinkles. Covering tweeter pods I sew cloth peaces together. This time I used only glue. And it turned out better then I suspected.
After that speaker pod cover was attached to the wooden ring fo the speaker pod with few screws.
