DeeCee

That is awesome - nice numbers

Actually guys, I was being unbiased in my opinion even though I am a distributor of sundown. The Audioque pushes out the numbers, but at 14.4v. Jacobs numbers are done at 12.8V testing. Unregulated power supply means that output goes up as voltage goes up. Hence why I provided the testing post as the real numbers are closer than expected. Then I looked at the aesthetic side of life with a chitty pic of the Audioque guts. That doesn't tell me anything about the amp and if it would integrate with an install well or even look good. It could be just a plain heatsink and look like chit, or it could look bloody great, but I don't know that because they don't have a decent product pic. Its $20 difference between teh audioque and the sundown. I know what the sundown looks like vs the guts of an amp and I know the power output difference @ 14.4V is around 250 - 300W - we dont' know the power ratings at 13.8 or 12.8V on the audioque so its not as easy to compare output. As for support, i know that Jacob @ Sundown and Chris @ DB-R are focussed on providing a more personalised service. For me that is more important knowing that they are accessible, even though they are very busy people, if i have questions or queries. For $20 more, having soemthing that I know looks good, pulls numbrs and has good support wins the day.. nuff said.

Done

Looking good

why not get 2x 100.2s instead of bridging a 50.4? or going to another 100.4 instead of having 3 amps for speaker duties unless you are trying to have defined speaker seperation..

I'd go for Sundown. Considering there is no product shot of the heatsink and you know that there is very good support behind the amplfier, its an easy decision to make. Check the sundown power testing here: http://www.soundsolutionsaudio.com/forum/i...?showtopic=7900 Personally, the look of the Sundown is very smart and sublime without being overly garish or flashy. The looks certainly fit well with numerous system designs and your BTL will love it. I'll be running a 3000D very soon with a RE MT18 in 8cu ft in my work car - theoretical numbers have the MT sitting around 150 odd for burps. If you run the sundown and know your res freq of the blazer, i'd be willing to take the time to design a box specifically for your car and predict some numbers for you

no its not rocket science but there is physics involved and understanding how everything works makes things more interesting

except when the person who gets on teh roof has metal studs on their jeans or shoes or wearing any sort of metal lol

Dependant on the amplifier or headdeck, a bass boost increases the volume at one particular frequency. The problem with that is a) knowing what that frequency is and b) understanding what that boost does to the signal. I've generally found that a bass boost doesn't provide a clean signal, so imagine if you input a dirty signal into your amplifier, you have more potential to distort the subwoofer making a situation where you can damage your sub.

ideally a system should be set up with an oscillioscope to ensure that you are not clipping the system into magic smoke. So gains would ideally be at a specific level. First things first though, you have to find your cars resonant frequency. From there, testing with an o-scope is used to determine a) headunit clipping point, b) amp clipping point - both for the specific frequency If you don't have the means to set up the gains with an o-scope, dependant on the system i'd set the gains around 1/2 first and then roll your volume up until you peak out. That would be your system limit. You can slowly creep up the gain a little bit and a little bit more, but I tend not to push things past 2/3rds on an amp If you guys can provide some pics of the boot area, then it would be helpful just to see how much room there is to move stuff around. Oh and no bass boost or eq tricks to push it up. It doesnt' really have much of an effect if you are playing a single tone.

i have never heard of closing air vents to be a violation of dbdrag rules. Its a normal function of the car, so I def agree it should be done. Pressing on the trunk lid or putting pressure on the roof has decreased SPL potential in all cars I have seen thus far and i've done some pretty extensive testing over the years.

corner load the sub ie move the box and aim it into the corner of the car opposite to the mic whatever side the mic is on, move the seat as far forward as possible and fold forward only press on the door side which the mic is located on depending on how big your 45s are will impact the increase or decrease in result. I generally use small 45s which don't impact much on the overall box volume to decrease deadspots at the wall intersections. I also resin out my comp enclosures as well, though it seems that this won't be a viable option for this particular box

Nope.. diff DeeCee. This is DeeCee from New Zealand aka FlexD2 on some other car forums. And Leigh stuck his leg out because he couldn't fit himself all the way in the box. there was no one else around to jump on it

Cheers I plan as much as possible in my head to ensure that the results come out as i expect them to. This build worked out pretty well, though in the end, I didn't have the time to fully complete what I wanted to do with the vehicle. The work car is getting some stuff done for the local series that is happening, so hopefully, I'll finish with some time to spare and get some proper testing done

They sound very good, pretty close to other top end speakers i've heard, though the tweeter has to be attenuated down as it is quite bright. The mids need some serious power in them to get them pumping, but overall, they are a well matched set that plays music very transparently without fatiguing the ears either.

Actually, the headunit is all in english. The japanese buttons you see at the top are for the trip computer etc. The fun ones are the japanese OEM navigation systems that are integrated in with the AC control as one unit that displays on a screen.

The steering wheel is on the correct side of the car, just like it we drive on the correct side of the road as well I'll get some pics of the rack in its final place later

Huh... i thought i put up these photos to this, but obviously not

People in boxes

Kat going hard with the router. The inside edge was also rounded off. We wanted to get the front plate in place, so we got busy test fitting it in and measuring it up. Box joins inside were sealed up with some no more gaps. Sexy big ass box! Mwahahahahaha :twisted: Me drilling holes for the front plate. Front plate mounted on to box and sub mounted into front plate. As per usual (and for some weird reason we always get into our boxes lol!!) me in the box doing something - wiring most likely.

Just like a rainbow Because of the time constraints, I removed the spacer after the glue had been setting for around 15 minutes. The glue is basically superglue, so initial contact grip is high and I had no fear of the coil moving out of alignment. I used a surplustronics 8" to put weight on the dustcap which was glued on with the same glue. Done like a done thing 2nd MT cleaning time - got to get rid of all the small stuff for clean contact between surround and basket! Same spacer, 2nd MT Back to the box. As you can see, I added threaded wood inserts all the way around the frame of the box to allow the front wall to be moved to any position I want to. box takes up a pile of room! and its damn beautiful! Front plate made of 3 sheets of 28mm ply sandwiched together. We didn't have a large enough compass this time around to measure the hole, so we used the old cut out from the SS1-2NW box. See, pays to have offcuts around :up:

Cardboard spacer for the coil alignment. Interesting note: I initially was going to use cut pieces of cardboard like I did with the XXX recone. Problem was that the I tired it and the gap was even less than the XXX So I tired manilla folder cardboard = fail, plastic sleeve material = fail, 3 different types of cardboard = fail. In the end, I found some cardboard that fit between the coil and the yoke like a glove. There was very little movement between the two, so was the perfect spacer. I marked out the point at which the cardboard hit the back plate and marked off to ensure that when the coil was over the yoke, the spacer was as far down as possible to ensure as perfect alignment as possible. Bloody beautiful mate! As you can see, I used some offcuts to hold the recone up while I applied the glue. Glue for spider ready to affix. Tip: Affix spider before affixing surround. Also, I'll most likely get a dremel and smooth out the vents on the basket under the spider to improve air flow and cooling next recone time Its always a close thing when working with 3 layer stiff spiders. Clamp Peg Super Force Kaa-pow! Was a little bit of a tight fit with the 3 layer spiders and the under edge of the MT basket. The new pegs worked out great! Glue time for the surround. It always pays to have a very clean and even surface when putting a surround down The start of things to come

One broken track on the coil - burnt out as explained in last update build post. The coil was so out of alignment that the coil rubbed on the yoke Me cleaning up the 2nd MT for the recone During this time of reconing, I had popped off the RE MT dustcap and had it sitting around. Kat had one of the reactor 8's around, so I thought it would be funny to chuck the MT dustcap on the Reactor to see if it would fit. And it did! So started the REactor8" that we used in our initial Krazy8 attempt at SLAP in November Inerestingly enough, when doing recones, I use the clamping force of washing pegs to ensure that there is an even load when pushing the surround onto the basket. I was just about to recone the first MT when I realised that I didn't have enough pegs to do the recone. There is a lot of surface area to cover on the lip and spider of the MT18 and I had to rush out to get some new pegs. I got some really funny looks while at the supermarket testing the spring tension of the different types of pegs Clean MT ready to get reconed. 1 x MT18 drop in recone kit - just add glue and solder A quick clean to ensure that there is no crap before using glue.

I emphasis this - all information contained forward is the logical deduction based on what I know of SPL and the effects of going hard in SPL setups. Equipment breaks/gets damaged and I have no issue with Pauls Audio or the state of goods that I bought 2nd hand after they had been in the Superstreet car. Pauls Audio sorted me out with the broken coil and I fully support them and the time and effort they put in to get loud in New Zealand. --------------------- The following are observations on the subs after they were broken and opened up for reconing. upon removing the spider and broken coils, we found that some interesting things had occured to the subs: 1) the broken coil was burnt out. I had already identified the broken coil side on the faulty sub and upon removing the spider/coil marked the coil side that was the trouble. Pics to follow, but the copper on the coil was burnt on one lead. This meant that the fault occured during one of the runs, which may have restricted the Pauls boys from getting higher than the score they hit with the MTs. 2) There was evidence of major rubbing of the coil within the motor. This was apparent on both coils. My conclusion was that the company who reconed the MTs from 10's to 18's did not align the coils properly. The MTs have a very tight tolerance and subsequently the mis-alignment at high power use wore the side off the coil. Of the two coils, one had more rub than the other and this I conclude was the issue of the step at the base of the box in the Daihatsu which caused uneven loading, thus causing the former to go even more out of alignment creating huge rubbing. Aer0 discussed the effects of uneven loading in this thread: http://forums.nzicemag.co.nz/viewtopic.php?t=16670 because there is something right behind the cone at the bottom and there is nothing there at the top as the cone moves in and out (very fast) its getting more pressure buildup from the bottom therefore having uneven pressure all around the cone area and causing it to flex more plus after a while it appears to have broken away and fc*ked itself.. 3) There was evidence of the coil hitting the backplate on both subs and we're talking some pretty good scoring/marking of the plate here. Scoring was one sided and not all the way around. Misalignment issues come up again here. There are a couple of potential reasons for this: - clipping the subs and over extending the linear range of the suspension causing the coil to hit the back plate. - misalignment of the the subs causing the scoring of the back plate I would lean to the arguement that some clipping and misalignment had the formers hitting the back plate. In SPL, we get to the point of clipping and to gain those extra db's we clip it ever so slightly. With the misalignment due to the step and primary reconing, it caused the coil to hit and make marks in the backplate. Pictures are a bit fuzzy due to having to highlight the picture so the scoring is evident but here they are. Pics of coil rub to follow. Again - these are only observations and conclusions of what I found on the MTs. Chris, Dale and Mike are stand up guys and my full support is behind them and the Pauls Audio shop 100%. chit happens in DBDrags with designs and equipment and they have made changes which have proven without a doubt that they are freaking loud in the world. --------------------- Cleaned up the basket of all the glue - took ages as i chiselled the glue off with a hammer and a screwdriver.. got super clean though!

Back wall was put into place and slipped under the top wall joints. Took a bit to get in there including lifting the side/top walls but it was a great fit. Note: The edge of the back wall at the top was routed round to ensure that the bowmac joints fit as close as possible. Taking into account these types of requirements early on ensure that things go as plan when it comes time to bring everything together. We decided to test the res freq of teh vehicle with a 12" behind the rear seat and the box taking up the void - res. freq was in the mid 70hz area. Of course, things change when the big sub is in. To get the sub in for testing, i had to climb in and support the sub from the back while Kat mounted the sub in the front plate. This shot is of me getting in to wire up the sub and test the resistance at this stage, we underwent testing in a sealed enclosure (well a big leaky box at least). Testing showed inconsistant resonant frequency results which went from 30 odd hertz to high 50 hertz. Initially I was testing with the sub with one broken coil (as referenced in the SS1-2NW build) Unfortunately during testing, I also smoked the other coil after playing sweeps through it so we had to get the sub out and install the other sub with two working coils. The good sub lasted all of one run which was a bewilderment to us. As such, we had recones on tap and we got stuck in getting the subs back to brand new. I got Kat to open up the subs as he hadn't reconed subs before and wanted to hack into one