First Monday Update!
Hopefully I can stick with steady updates.
I was able to get a few hours in each day this weekend.
Saturday I got some more work done on the firewall and body of the car. I was able to start smoothing out all the repair fiberglass and work on blending all the edges. Some surfaces were so far off, that when I sanded them down, I ended up going right through. This isnt a big deal and I was kinda expecting it. I will just add another layer of fiberglass to the inside and outside and sand again. This time, I wont end up with the big hole.....can you see it??
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
Rick and I also started some of the more tedious work on the body as well. When the car had been put back together before, with the bent frame, the body ended up crooked as well. So we have to fix this. We started by heating the bonding strip that holds the front edge of the left quarter panel on and was able to break the glue lose. Just in doing this, caused the quarter panel to move very easily. Originally we had thought we needed to replace it, Now we dont even think it needs to come all the way off! we just need to lift the back of the car and glue the quarter back on and it should be all set! Very exciting. BTW, a quarter panel is $365, glad it doesn't need replacing!
We also started work on the door sill part of the car. This piece was just so broken, that we decided to replace it with a piece of the junkyard car. This was pretty easy to do. A few cuts with a sawzall and the old one was out. The a little grinding and cutting and the replacement piece fits perfectly.
Heres a pic of the piece cut out and if you look closely, you can see the edge of the detached quarter panel.
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
On Sunday, I was able to get some work done on another piece of the project. A custom subwoofer enclosure for the car. Now im sure your thinking "Why would you waste space and weight on subwoofers?" Well you are partially right. Heres some backstory. The car originally has only 2 speakers in the kick panels in the front of the car. These are 4x6" little things. Absolutely no low end is coming from these. It was an option in a later year to get 2 more of these speakers in the dash. So this is what I will be doing, but still no low end. To balance everything out front to back, I will be adding 2 more of these speakers to the panels of the coupe. But still no low end. Im not looking for thunderous bass in the car, just enough to round out the frequency response and make it sound good.
So here is what I came up with.
Directly behind the seats of the car is 2 storage cubby's. Originally, these had the cars battery and the jack in them. Well now, the jacks cubby will be a subwoofer box. BUT, this will be a very special box. I still want to be able to use these storage compartments for mounting of the amplifier for the speakers and the onboard computer as well as some other little stuff.
What I ended up doing was using some very cool little subwoofers. They are 6.5" high excursion woofers. They are small, light, and very capable. So what I decided to do was build the most compact box that I could, while achieving maximum output. I decide to build a Bandpass style box. This is a box that the woofer is completely inside the box, mounted on a divider to make 1 box, 2 box's. One of the box's is sealed, and the other half is a tuned ported half.
O, I forgot, I have to replace this storage section of the car with one that came from a junkyard car because the one in the car now is smashed up. This makes it really easy to develop the box outside the car.
I started by creating the divider plate for splitting the storage bin into the 2 compartments.
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
This was mainly 2 hours of cutting, recutting sanding and some more cutting to get the pieces to fit perfectly. The next piece I made was the front part to seal it off.
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
After each chamber was defined, I covered the speaker holes with tape and filled each chamber individually with sand to get a measured volume. This is a very important part of tuning the port in the second chamber.
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
After I got my measurements, I built the top of the box. This will serve as the rest of the enclosure and the mounting shelve for the computer and amplifier. I designed this to be 2 parts so half can be removed if the subs ever need to be accessed.
Untitled by
AdamBrunette, on Flickr
One change I need to make to the car to make all this worth it is to change the compartment door's to a later year's version. Originally the car has 3 doors. One for jack, one for battery and a smaller one for storage. The later years share the jack and storage and the battery has its own. This what I will end up using.
And the original:
This will allow me acces to the computer and amp when I need it, but they will stay hidden so nobody will know they are there! Should look very good.
Well I think thats it for this weekend. More to come soon!
-Adam
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