We started offering the speakers up against the front doors, it quickly became clear that we would have to modify the inner panels in a big way. This involved cutting out the lower half of the door panels and replacing them with 3mm thick stainless steel sheets that bolted back in place of the original flimsy panels. We strengthened the door by doing this, I was concerned that in a side impact, I wanted the door to be stronger than standard. With the doors modified and sound deadened, Alan then had the task of sculpting some elegant panels that would take the door speakers and tweeters. After a lot of discussion and offering up, The decision was to create a pot on the back of the panel for the mid range speaker, sound deaden and use the entire door cavity for the woofers and have the tweeters pointing up at your ears when sat in the seat mounted in their own little turrets.
This accomplished we then addressed the rear side doors. These didn’t require as much work as the front but still involved making a panel for them with the tweeters in turrets again.
The DVD player was fitted into the bottom of the back of the cubby box. Again we had to cut out a load of plastic and Alan had to make another neat mounting for it.
Having got the woodwork constructed for the front, We could now start to run cables and work out routing. We had knocked up a crude bulkhead in ply with the amps etc mounted on it. This gave Alan a rough idea how we wanted it to look. It was then that I had the brainwave of making the bulkhead out of Polycarbonate. Alan was not impressed as it made it a lot harder to interface with his woodwork, however he worked away at it and got it sorted.
The reason for the Polycarbonate bulkhead was that Nick had expressed an interest to have it lit at night. My original thought had been to bury some blue diodes into the outer faces of the Poly and make the whole panel appear as a blue haze that could be seen through. It was a nice idea but when we started mocking it up, it didn’t work that well. Alan was now under way with the main shell of the rear cabinet, The front consoles and door speaker mounts were given the final rub down and were stained in this glorious grey slightly metallic looking…Brown?? The colour wasn’t what I was expecting at all. It was very bizarre, the wood looked brown under artificial light depending on the angle it was viewed from and varied again in the flaming in the wood. Outside in natural light it varied from silver grey to brown with a grey tinge. I wasn’t sure at first, but Alan assured me it would improve when the lacquer was applied, he was right it bought out all the natural colours and patterns in the wood and bought the grey out again, what a relief!!!
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