Covering midbass pods with cloth

     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. 

After that speaker pod cover was attached to the wooden ring fo the speaker pod with few screws.

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.

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: