Hey all. Well I finally got the pics of phase I. I've already completed phase II. Those pics will be up shortly. In phase I had to make a fiberglass mold of my rear storage compartment and also remove all the old stereo equipment from my Jeep.

I don't have anything real technical to add to this. I wish I had done phase I and II at the same time but here are a few of the memories that will forever be with me. I thought I'd share, you should get a good laugh from some of these...

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My car and my buddy's CRX. Which is for sale if someone wants to put him out of his misery...

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This is me preping the garage. I had to get the lawn mower outta the way. I'm from TN so it's perfectly fine to ride a lawn mower where I'm from...


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Here's the rear end of my jeep. Notice the amps are not mounted with anything. They're just laying on the carpet. This is BAD. VERY BAD! Do not do this.


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Now back to the way things are supposed to be done. I put enough aluminum foil down to ensure that the resin did not end up touching the car and sticking forever. I'm not a chemist but the fiberglass will not stick to the foil. I wanted the box to be a bit small to ensure I can put dynamat or whatever underneath at some point.

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I then covered all of the aluminum foil with masking tape and then finally with some duct tape. In hindsight I probably shouldn't have let the duct tape be the last layer but it worked out without any problem.

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I used some of the free plastic from Lowe's to cover the rear end and protect from resin spills.

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Here is a pic of the fiberglass. This is layer 1 and I used approx 4 layers. The cloth is a heck of alot easier to work with. I was concerned that it might not be strong enough on the sides so I also ended up using matt in conjunction with the cloth.

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This is another example of how NOT to wire your amps. I didn't utilize a crimp connector. This again was STUPID.

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Do NOT do this with your ground.
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This is also a pretty STUPID thing to do with a ground. The ground should be no longer than 18 inches.

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Back to fiberglassing, this layer 2 with some cloth and matt. I used a couple of halogen lamps to help heat the place up. It wasn't quite warm enough and there wasn't enough sunlight. I'm not sure if it helped but it took 15 mins to untangle an extension cord so it had to help some
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Here's a pic of my buddy doing his part. He's not to happy that I had clean hands to nab a picture. This was my idea to protect our arms. I got quite a bit of resin on my forearms. Needless to say that's pretty nasty stuff so this is a cheap alternative. In hindsight I wish I had gone to a farming store and bough gloves that extend to your elbow.

http://www.ece.utk.edu/~ccarrol2/pic...o/DSC00583.jpg This was probably the most disturbing of everything I encountered. I pulled the 4 guage power wire going to my MTX500D and the end of it just popped right off. This is really stupid. I'm embarassed to post this but it's a learning experience. Check your wires periodically. I really thought I hadn't screwed up power wires.

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This is an example of how I interpreted what EatRice explained about cutting the cloth/mat to meet your specifications. This really helped out rather than using one huge sheet. Measure once glass twice I always say!

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The plastic saved my garage floor after being a little to excited with the last layer of glass.

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The finished product. Now it's just time to dry.

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All the innards from my last "placement." I built the box in my high school physics class as my final project. Everyone else built a bridge. I also tested the sound levels in dB.

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For all of you thinking, jeez that's a waste of aluminum foil, masking tape, and duct tape, this is all I have to say. It works and fits great!

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The finished product of phase I. It took me and my friend from a 9:45AM meeting at Lowe's until approx. 7:00PM.

The time to do this could easily be cut down but I'm really **** about my vette and I'm making sure I don't muck this up.

I hope this was helpful to you all. If not surely you got a good laugh from some of my stupidity.




[Modified by noelc5, 10:55 PM 6/8/2004]

I changed to links since the pics are soo huge. I don't have any graphics tools right now. If tomorrow is slow at work I'll resize.

If you want to see all the pics hit http://www.ece.utk.edu/~ccarrol2/pics/stereo


[Modified by noelc5, 10:59 PM 6/8/2004]

 

wow. that is impressive!!!!!!!!!