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Okay, actually got some measurable work done on the Traverse today.  When I last posted I had test fit the installation of the bracket for the sail panel on the passenger side, the only side I had removed the factory sail panel from at that point.  When I tightened the bracket up I popped one of the welds loose on the upper bolt part of the bracket.  I took them both back to work, realizing I didn't get good penetration on the weld and made sure they were welded together much better.  I also made a little room to clear a washer on another screw that 's in the same area.  I put the passenger one back in today and verified the welding would hold this time and I had SUCCESS!!  So I took the panel off the drivers side door so I could remove the factory sail panel and had success with that one as well.  The entire process didn't take as long as I had first planned so I was left standing there contemplating what to do with the rest of the time I had to work on it this morning and then it dawned on me.  I still have a lot of work that needs done to get the speakers installed but one of the things that needs done to facilitate the installation of the speakers is the installation of the sound deadening.  So I set to work and pulled all the necessary supplies out to the truck.  As you can see I went about doing it a little differently than the guru suggests.  Instead of using velcro to attach the layers of CCF and MLV to the door and then attach the panel I attached the CCF and MLV to the panel itself.  It seemed easier to me to put it on there and have it come off with the panel every time than it did to take the panel off then remove the deadening.  The process seemed successful enough as the deadening stayed on the panel quite well when I was done and installed back on the door with about the same pain in the ass amount of trouble it has even without the deadening on it.  I haven't had any time at all to listen to it and see what kind of difference it made on this side since the wife took off in the vehicle as soon as I had the drivers side completed.  So, I still have the deadening to do on the passenger door and hopefully I'll get my new table saw picked up real soon and I'll be able to knock out the rest of the build fairly quick. (I hope)  So, on to a few pics.

 

 

 

 

Here's the bracket installed on the drivers door.

 

 

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Here's the door before any of the CLD tiles were installed.

 

 

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Here's a shot of the factory deadener.  There was still a tremendous amount of panel resonance even with that big piece on there.  It goes from that point almost all the way to the front of the door.

 

 

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It took these three pieces added to this end of the panel to make a noticeable difference.

 

 

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On this end of the door the only area that was bad was down low just right behind and below the speaker location.

 

 

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Here's the CCF and MLV rolled out on the ground to begin working with it.

 

 

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Here's the back side of the door panel before anything is applied.

 

 

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Here's the first layer of CCF rough cut to the panel.  There were several more things to trim around.

 

 

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Here's the MLV rough cut to the panel.  

 

 

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I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the pictures.  I lost the pics of the final trimming and 2nd layer of CCF as well.  Damn touch screens, that's what I get for not locking the screen each time, lol.  Anyway, after putting the panel with all that deadening back on I found a few more small places that could use a little extra trimming but other than that it seems pretty well completed.  I'm still trying to locate some small accordion boots to get the speaker wires from the cabin to the inside of the doors.  Chevy didn't leave any unused pins/slots/spots (whatever you want to call them) in the connector that is used on this vehicle so I'm left having to run it in addition.  If I can't find an accordion boot to use I'm going to simply use some rubber grommets and the Knukonceptz Karma SS bi-wire speaker wire to complete the speaker wire run.  Otherwise now I just need my table saw to get the sail panel baffles completed and it should also help facilitate the building of the baffles for the woofers as well as the false floor amp rack and subwoofer enclosure as well.  

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Wow.  Things have came a long way since I made the last post here.  At that point the entire install was to be as close to a stealth install as possible.  The tweeters were going to go in the factory locations and the midranges were going to go into the sail panels.  What was worse was the woofers were going to go into the factory location, albeit with their own strong baffles, but still a tired and old way of doing things sticking them wherever was convenient or easy.  Right after this things started to get a little crazy in my life.  I couldn't get any work done on anything and it didn't let up through the winter.  Eventually early this spring the shit hit the proverbial fan and I had to make some big changes.

 

Plans changed on the Traverse around that time as well.  My wife got tired of waiting for it to get done so we had a good long talk about the plans for it and what the plans entailed.  We opted to go a little different route on the doors than the semi-stealth install that was originally settled upon.  As a matter of fact, what we decided to do couldn't hardly have been more the opposite of stealth.  Custom fiberglass work, custom aiming and mounting locations, real ported enclosures for the woofers and all that jazz is what was decided.  As you can see in the pictures below the custom locations are still on the doors.

 

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And so the plan was born...  I wanted the speakers close enough that they all played well together and high enough to keep the stage up on the dash.  I also wanted the best midbass output I could get from the woofers and after modeling them I found that a .5 cuft ported enclosure tuned to 65hz with a 2" port and with a 50hz @ 24dB slope gave the best response and kept the driver under the best control, the least amount of port noise and the most output under those circumstances.  Finding even just .5 cuft of space on these doors was quite a challenge and everything about it took me right out of my comfort zone.  I did more testing, test fitting, and rethinking than I have on any other build I've done.  

 

To make room for the enclosure the entire bottom of the door card had to be cut out/off.  The top corner of the door card was cut out to make room for midrange and tweeter mounting.

 

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I didn't have much room to work with and with space at a premium in this case I used a high grade 1/2" hardwood plywood to create the backbone/frame of the enclosure.  I had to slowly and methodically measure, cut and test fit every piece of every panel of the walls on the enclosure to ensure it would work and fit.  

 

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I couldn't miss out on a single cubic inch of available space so I worked out kerfing one of the top panels to follow the curve of the door card.

 

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After getting that far I had to work out the aiming on the woofers.  I also wanted to make sure that if I ever had to change the drivers out in the future that the aiming would (very hopefully) be adequate for those drivers as well since this woofer only plays up to 800hz.  I aimed the drivers for the middle of the vehicle, directly between the front seat head rests.  I did that because if I tried to turn the driver's side woofer up to where it would aim directly at the driver the woofer would not fit up high on the door.  It would interfere with the dash and the part of the door card where the window controls and such was also in the way and would had to have been modified and I just couldn't come up with a good way to do that either.  I had good luck in the van with the center aiming and with a little testing it seemed to be okay in the Traverse so that's what I went with.

 

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At this point I had to start worrying about how I was going to finish the enclosure.  I used some of the same grade plywood in 3/4" thickness to top and follow the walls of the enclosure so that I had something to round over and give a smoother finish to the fiberglass.  I used some Inifnity Reference One bookshelf speakers I have early on to do a little testing on placements and such as they are the smallest speakers I own in the house, lol.  I found then that aiming them with the port firing into the foot area under the dash resulted in an amazing response boost in the lower registers.  Without the enclosures already built and any way to test how it would work for these speakers I decided to try it for the Bravox woofers and these enclosures.  So I put the port opening directly below the woofer aiming forward into the foot well.

 

 

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So, now it's time for the fiberglass.  While I have used fiberglass before to repair a few tanks, dock floats, etc. none of them had to look good when they were done and none of them were done like this.  I was able to ask around a little before starting what kind of fiberglass products to use and get a few tips and pointers.  I feel that information was paramount to the outcome of this project.  If it weren't for the fella's who gave me that information this would have undoubtedly been a disaster.  I picked up some good stretchy fabric to use for the base and some 435 polyester resin and some 7725 Twill fiberglass cloth from US Composites.  While I'm no fiberglass expert I think the products from USC are without a doubt better than anything I could have picked up locally and definitely better than I had used in the past.

 

I got the stretchy fabric the wife had picked up at Jo-Ann crafts stretched over the enclosures and stapled down tight, or at least I thought it was tight enough.   One of those little things you learn from experience is that the fabric has to be SUPER TIGHT to work.  Once the weight of the resin was on the fabric it began to droop and I quickly pulled it tight enough to hold straight across the expanse of the enclosure and stapled it back down.  That lesson was learned at the expense of my stapler, lol.  It didn't work so good after getting resin in the chute where the staples come out.  That in turn created a bunch of wrinkles that weren't present before the resin application and therefore I did my best to smooth it out and applied the fiberglass cloth over those spots to keep everything in good shape.  It seems to have worked out.

 

 

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While I was applying layers of fiberglass to the enclosures I was able to work on the exact locations and aiming for the tweeter and the midrange and got those mounting rings glued into place.

 

 

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After over a dozen layers of fiberglass the enclosures were finally ready.  I dropped the woofers in and tested the strength of the enclosures every so often.  With 14 layers of glass on them the fiberglass didn't move at any frequency I played with over 100 watts of power driving them.  Between pressure from the wife and being COMPLETELY burned out doing the work on the fiberglass I deemed that test good enough and began to work on getting the enclosures and the speakers put into the truck.

 

I applied the CCF foam that I had put behind the door card on the driver's door to the back of the enclosures (so as not to go to waste) to help prevent any possibility of rattles between the wood of the enclosure and the door panel and did so on both enclosures.

 

 

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Here's how the enclosures turned out looking after the fiberglass was done.

 

 

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As you can see they're still a good fit in the door card.  I also took this opportunity to get the wires ran to all the appropriate locations.

 

 

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Finally, onto mounting everything to the doors.  I couldn't figure out a good way to temporarily attach the enclosure to the door card and I couldn't figure out a better way to make a better way to shape the door for the finishing fiberglass work than expanding foam.  Then it kinda hit me, it seemed like the best answer for both.  The foam can glue the enclosures into place inside the door card and give me the foundation I need to put finishing layers of fiberglass down to smooth everything out and (hopefully) make it look like the doors could have been made from the factory like this.  I put plastic behind the door cards when I put them back on the doors to keep the foam from attaching to the door itself.  Then I got to filling all the voids with foam.

 

 

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After the foam had finished setting up I took a knife and some sandpaper and began to work on removing the excess foam and rough shaping it.

 

 

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Finally here it is with the Bravox CS603CF 3 way component set installed.  It still boggles my mind how large these enclosures ended up, how little space there is between everything, and nothing rubs anywhere.  I got so lucky on this that it still makes my mind spin when I look back at how much work has gone into this and how much of that work was simply all I could figure out to do with it given the circumstances I was dealing with.

 

 

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The speakers sound amazing.  I mean absolutely amazing.  The bass response is so phenomenal I have to remind myself that the subs aren't installed yet and they're still only on HU power.  They do so at every volume level from barely audible to right at the limit of the internal amp in the HU they come across smooth, detailed and balanced.  All the work to make this a custom installation seems to have been worth all the time, effort and money to make it happen.  I can't wait to get the last of the fiberglass work done (when the insane heat and humidity finally breaks) and hopefully get this thing showed off to some of you at the big shows.

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And last but least, this weekend I got started on the amp rack.  I shaped the front of the rack to match the width of the center console for the front seats to help it look a little more like it belongs there.  I placed the Harmony DSP at the front to take the signals in from the HU and distribute them accordingly.  I am putting the subwoofer amp in the middle simply to keep the ground and power runs to it as absolutely short as possible.  The battery is located behind the passenger seat and under the floor so it's not far away at all to start with but I want the ground as short as possible so that's where it will be at.  Finally the four channel amp will be behind the sub amp.

 

 

 

Gotta love flush trim bits!

 

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And here's the basic layout.

 

 

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That's everything up to now.  

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Long time no here from.....a is your school still doing that car show this year....nice build by the way as always....

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Yeah I hated taking off and being gone this long but it was definitely necessary.

Yes the local college here has that show every year. I'll get a date for it posted up as soon as I get it. We also have car shows a few times a year put on by the Hoosier Cruisers car club. Although the club focuses mainly on classics they invite anyone with anything to the shows. The next one of their shows is the weekend of August 15th.

Thanks for the compliment on the build.

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I wish I had the patience to do all that work for just a sound system.:)

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I wish I had the patience to do all that work for just a sound system.smile.png

Sorry I hadn't seen this until now.  From a patience standpoint it was absolutely grueling.  Not only because of the work itself but because there was so much time in between the instances where work actually got done that has caused this whole project to have been taking over a year now, again, like the Jimmy which isn't even completed yet.  The good thing about that is that it ensures that it gets done exactly like I want and/or how it should be done.

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Another small update to post up.  The amp rack is pretty much completed.  The only thing left to do with the amp rack itself is the last second addition of hinges.  I was going to just screw the top down to the base but I'm afraid that if I have to remove it to make adjustments too many times that it will ultimately end of causing problems.  So I've opted to put some hinges on the top to allow for it to simply be opened when adjustments are needed along with the use of a cabinet lock to keep it shut.  The only other part of the rack I have to complete is cutting some 1/4" thick perforated steel to size to fill the recesses in the top of the rack lid to protect the top of the amps while allowing air to ventilate.  The 1/4" thick perforated steel has 3/4" holes and in adverse weather conditions I'll be temporarily covering the rack with floor mats to protect everything.

 

So onto some pictures.

 

 

Here I'm checking the fitment of the rack base along with making sure there is sufficient clearance for the 4 gauge and 1/0 power wires to make the trip from the battery to the amps.

 

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I've got the ventilation holes cut, routed and ready for the perforated steel inlays.  I also have gotten the upright supports glued into place as well.

 

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The amp rack is pretty much completely done at this point.  The base is painted with rubberized undercoating and carpeting has been applied with contact cement.  I have some thin sheet metal that was left over from the door inserts for our cabinet doors from the kitchen renovations we're also in the middle of.  It looks pretty good but will not likely be permanent due to it's "overly light for the application" nature.  I will likely find something in 16 gauge perforated steel to replace it at some point in the future.

 

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That's all the updates I have to post up right now.  If life will ever cooperate I will have the amp rack installed this weekend, or next considering that next weekend should be a 3 day weekend for me.

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Bad ass amp rack :phatyo:

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looking good Alton!

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Nice

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Bad ass amp rack :phatyo:

looking good Alton!

  

Nice

Thanks guys.

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Awesome sauce bro!

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Awesome sauce bro!

 

 

Thanks brother!

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, just a small update here.  I've been working on getting some of the small stuff done the last couple of weeks.  I prewired the amps and DSP in the false floor/amp rack so that all I have to do when I get the time is drop it in, get all the wires hooked up, and get everything tuned.  I've gotten the remote knob for the Z-1K and the remote controller for the DSP mounted in a pocket at the bottom of the dash.  Those associated wires and the RCA's and remote wire were all ran at that point.  I also decided to go ahead and run new speaker wires to the doors which involved me having to take the doors off to drill holes, install rubber grommets and then run the wires up under the dash and through to the doors.  So everything wiring related is ready to go.  

 

 

 

Here's a few pictures.  I would like to have taken more but with my super limited time to work on this stuff I keep finding myself taking pictures as an after thought.  Sorry guys.

 

 

This is the remote knob for the sub amp and the controller for the Harmony DSP.  I had to do some custom fab work to that little pocket to fit these here but they're in and don't look too shabby.

 

 

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Here's a shot of the door jamb where the KnuKonceptz Karma SS speaker wire is passing through.  The outer jacket on this wire makes it PERFECT for this application.

 

 

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Finally here's the false floor/amp rack with the covers over the amps finished with paint and clear coat and the associated wiring.  All it needs is put into the Traverse and hooked up!

 

 

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There's this little update.  I can't begin to pretend to have any clue when I'll be able to get it put in and that update posted up, lol.

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Looking good so far man

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Looking good so far man

 

 

Thanks brother!  I figure any progress is a good thing, lol.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of progress, I have an update!!  The false floor/amp rack is installed, hooked up, and the Bravox set has REALLY come to life now!  That little Zapco ST-4D is a powerhouse for it's size and the Bravox CS603CS components are digging everything it's throwing at them bridged.  The midbass impact went from definitely feeling it to almost feeling a little violent.  It's a bit freaky to hear and feel the midbass like that and then take a close look at everything and it doesn't even look like it's working hard to do it.  It's making me SUPER excited to get the SLS 8's shoehorned into the Jimmy!

 

Here's some pictures of it completed.

 

 

Here's the wiring connected at the battery.  I ordered and used the new battery terminals that Knukonceptz has available.  I wasn't horribly impressed with the first ones they had, which I used in the Jimmy.  These are fantastic and tighten up on the terminals perfectly which was the issue I had with the other ones.  These have three set screw connections, 1/0, 4 AWG and 8AWG respectively and a bolt on the side which can be used for ring terminals or, as in the case with my setup, with the available top post adapters that I used for the factory wires to connect to.  All said and done it's a super solid setup and should serve me well for a long time.

 

 

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Here's the final wiring pictures of the amps in the amp rack.  With everything connected there's not as much room as I had hoped for between everything but it should still all be far enough apart to prevent any issues.  I can't wait to get the enclosure built for the DCON's so I can hear that Zapco Z-1KD do work.  Being so close to the battery with the 1/0 wiring it shouldn't want for power at any time.

 

 

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Here's another shot of the remote knob for the Zapco and the remote controller for the Soundstream Harmony.  I'm going to have to put a little finger nail polish or something on that LED for the Zapco knob but otherwise they're lit up and showing that things are ready to rock!

 

 

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Lastly here's a few pictures of the amp rack with the lid shut and it slid fully into position after setting the gains on the Harmony and the ST-4D.  Because it's bridged I played with everything and got one side as close to just right as I could setting it by ear then used a 400hz tone and my DMM to match the voltage output of the 3/4 bridged channels to the 1/2 bridged channels.

 

 

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Well, that's it for now.  I spent some time tuning the HPF, time alignment and EQ's for the speakers.  I have plenty more tuning to do but the wife was too excited to get to go play with it for a bit to do any more today, lol.  Time to start on a final design for the subwoofer enclosure and get started building that while looking for time to complete the fiberglass work on the front doors.

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Try these for the leds, work well on the things I've used them on. And it it doesn't dim enough I double them up.

http://www.amazon.com/LightDims-793573834232-Original-Strength/dp/B009WSJNCW

Awesome! Thanks for the link to that! I have considered doing something similar with window tint, looks like someone else beat me to it.

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Damn Alton, your work makes me wanna hire you to do my truck :D

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Seeing that baseball bat in your wife's ride got me thinking I need to get a new one. I gave my mother mine since she didnt want a gun or knife for protection.

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Seeing that baseball bat in your wife's ride got me thinking I need to get a new one. I gave my mother mine since she didnt want a gun or knife for protection.

  

LOL, my wife (in years past) actually used it on several occasions and then her aunt lost it. This one is still virgin but goes everywhere with her. She's definitely not a woman to be messed with, lol.

Damn Alton, your work makes me wanna hire you to do my truck :D

Brother, if it could work out I'd definitely never turn down a chance to help. Thanks dude I appreciate it.

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