Loud & Low 8th Gen Civic - Time to say good bye to her.

[Carbon]

Looks like you really were building that work bench lol

Great work man

[scooter99]

Thanks guys.

Yeah Wicks I know what you're talking about. This is the first actual "Shop" I've ever had. I'm gonna do it up right so I can work inside and out.

See Carbon, I told you I was building a coffin.............errrr I mean workbench! LMAO!

[JeremyN]

looks good Scott

[scooter99]

Ok so I did a little bit of work tonight. This is the way it's going to be for a while. Probably always until this is done unless I get some time off days. But I'm trying to keep myself happy by doing work, as well as, keep the wifey happy by taking care of business at home with the kids and the house too. So it'll be an hour here an hour there during the weekdays, and then probably a few hours here and there on the weekends. Hopefully that will translate into good progress to keep us all happy.

Let's get on with it.

So last time I left you I was very happy with the start of the amp rack. I still like it but I think it could use more. I didn't like the amp panels only in there, and I wanted something to fill in the empty voids. So I came up with an idea. That's what I'm doing now. Let's take a look!

Stripped the amp panels off the mounts. Then put it back in it's place in the trunk.

Then, thankfully I just moved so I have a lot of these laying around. A L O T of them. I saved them on purpose!

Next I had to start making the templates.

mocking up the driver side panel. This is just for the contours of the spare well.

mocking up the passenger side, same thing.

Next I had to make a one piece template. I did this for a couple of reasons. First to make sure I have a nice fit all the way around. Hard to do that with a bunch of pieces taped together. Next so that I have one piece to trace off of and make my wooden template. So that's what I'm doing here.

One side done

Time for the other side.

Then I got them put back in, did some trimming, and actually had to add some to one side, but then cut another full piece, and we're all good. This is what it looks like.

So that's it for tonight. This was about an hours worth of work. Maybe an hour and a half. Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be able to transfer the cardboard to 1/4" ply and get those ready to go. I won't be using the 1/2" birch anymore, I have different plans. So the 1/4" is going to be a starting point, and I'll go from there.

On another note, I went out and got some fleece this weekend, and last week, from Joann Fabric. They had a 50% off sale, and their fleece was $4.99 instead of 8.99 or whatever it normally is. So I got quite a few yards of that for these projects. Not sure if I have enough for it all, but it'll be enough to get me going.

Thanks all for checking in. More progress in the next day or so.

Don't forget to check out my facebook page, Loud & Low 8th Gen and like it for updates and info before it hits here.

[scooter99]

Got a little gift from the UPS guy today. I wasn't going to order this, but I didn't have time to do a custom mount for the head unit. So I decided EFF it, and got one off amazon with 2 day shipping. So tonight I'll put the head unit it. This is not the plan as of now. It's only temporary, cause I have a feeling everything else will be done before I get the head unit done. So for now, I'll run this, and then I have a main source unit, and then when I decide on the tablet mount etc, I'll change it out at that point.

Not much of an update, but again, an update.

[scooter99]

So I got a few things done last week. Thursday and Friday nights I decided to put some new mids and tweets in my doors, and put my X9500BHS head unit it. I was going to Reno Saturday to hang out with Jon (Skyhighcaraudio), Kyle and Laura Blackwelder (Kylar96) and LeAndre (Ibleedmusik). But before that, I was not going to listen to my oem head unit, with patched up aux cord, and what I think are blown front speakers. Needed some good music for my 3 hour trip!

So let's begin with thursday night.

I got the Soundstream Mids and tweets out that I'm going to use in the truck, and decided since I have 8, i"ll borrow 2 for this. It's only temporary until I can get my doors made up anyway. But I was tired of the crackling and distortion sound of my coaxials.

So I pulled the door panels. Already has plenty of deadener on it, and sealed up for sure. I used some sheet metal and deadener on it to close up the big hole in the door. But here is the door and the coaxial. It's an Alpine Type S 6.5 coaxial. I actually snaked these from the truck when I first got it. When I was selling off some other stuff.

Close up of the Alpine, it's tired!

Got so busy I didn't get pics of the mid in, but here's the panel back on.

Then I moved onto the driver door

Started running out of daylight, but I re deadened the door over the sheetmetal you see there. Recall that this was the side that was damaged in the accident. So they removed this and put it back on. I may reconstruct the whole door again, cause they fucked up the deadener that was already on it too. So this may get a full on redo when the new door panels are built. But for now, we're just doing temp stuff.

So door back on and you can really see here that it was pretty close to dark.

I actually did that on purpose cause since it was dark out, that gave me a chance to clean up and head in to fire up the soldering iron and get the harness built.

Not the greatest picture, but here is the harness plug for the OEM harness, antenna adapter, pioneer harness, axxess SWI adatper, and some 16ga Sky High Car Audio speaker wire. Now we're cookin! Why the SHCA wire you ask? Well when took my last head unit out, I had to go back to the oem harness and head unit, and the mids in the doors were wired up with the other speaker wire I had, not on the oem wire. SO instead of pulling the doors apart just to hook them up, I had just run a little run up behind the head unit, and connected it to that. Well it's big, bulky, stiff, and really needed to be re routed cause it falls down from under the dash and I hit it with my feet when i drive. Not very safe. SO I decided to use the SHCA stuff to re do it.

If you don't know me by now, then you don't know, but I solder everything. I don't like butt connectors, for a couple of reasons but mainly because I think they're ugly. I like to go that extra mile on my installs. So yes, even thought he head unit is temporary, I want them soldered here too. So that's what I'm doing at the kitchen table here. Started with 12v, ignition and ground. The ignition has 2 (one for head unit, and one for axxess SWI), and the ground has 3 (one for head unit, one for axxess SWI, and one for the oem harness that has to be grounded for the SWI to work).

See now how do you think this would look with butt connectors?! Like ass, that's right! Is it behind the dash? Yes it is. Is anyone going to see it, aside from these pictures? No they're not. But here's the thing, if I'm willing to cut corners on stuff like this, that can't be seen, then where else am I going to cut corners where you can't see? I don't, and that's why I do this. It's a concept that I think a few more people around here could take up! But I'll leave it at that.

Next I did the dimmer wire and the remote wire.

The group shrinked.

[03 Xtreme Fosgate]

Very nice work sir

[scooter99]

Next up is the speaker wires.

Fronts

Rears

Shrinked

Harness is done with exception of a couple of connections that have to be made in the car.

This brings me to Friday! On Friday afternoon when I got home I went right to getting the dash kit put together and head unit inserted in it.

The goods!

Dash Kit being put together

Pocket

Now the sexy. I'm really impressed that Pioneer started doing this little cloth sheet over the front of their head units. Looks like an extra step to keeping it protected even though it's surrounded by styrofoam. Nice job Pioneer!

and she's in her resting place ready to do work!

Now it's time to get her installed.

The oem unit. Eww!

I'm going to put the mic for the bluetooth here.

Got the speaker wires installed, soldered, and heat shrinked.

Tweeter wires. These were some wires I put in the doors for some leds that are in under the handles. I'll probably re hook those up later on down the line. Really gave off a good look. But for now they'll work for tweeter wires.

Lost the light so I didn't take driver side pics, but it was done the same way. Soldered, and shrinked.

Got the rest installed and this was what she looked like that night.

Fuzzy pic sorry, but I had it on bluetooth audio listening to the game while I was in there. NO MORE PATCHED AUX CORD!! WOOT!! Also shows battery level, and also shows signal strength right off the phone.

Here's a better pic in the light of how it looks in the dash.

So I drove all the way to reno, and back with this and I'm in love with it. I haven't even cracked the manual yet and need to cause there's some stuff on here I don't know about yet.

When I got it all hooked up on Friday night I had a moment of panic cause the Axxess unit didn't work. But I was rushing and when you rush, you forget things sometimes. I didn't forget a step as far as installation, but when I had this hooked up last time, it was for a different unit, obviously. So I had to press the reset button so it would go through it's programming again. After that, works great! I need to re program it a bit though, cause for the radio, it doesn't go through the presets like I want, it scrolls up and down the radio dial. So I'll have to change that. Otherwise it's great. I love my SWC and I couldn't live with out them. Although I better get used to it, cause I won't be able to use them with the tablet. But the knob from the 360 will be very accessible, so that will be ok to change over to I guess.

I'll be back, I have more.

[Chris Hammer]

I like soldering connections too. I just feel better about it.

I like your first rim selection better IMO. Looks cleaner. Thats just my thoughts though.

Great job on the work bench. I'm diggin it.

[scooter99]

Very nice work sir

Thank you sir.

I really need to get a good camera. Maybe I'll be able to do that here soon. The blurry pics drive me nuts!