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.

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: