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

[Kyblack76]

Go get er....

laura and i like the page (long ago )

Stoked to see it start.....

Go get it..... We are watching... (let me know if you need anything, ill do what i can)

[FieroGrande]

Damn I bet you are ready now with all the new toys and tools. Get the bitch rolling

[scooter99]

Ok let's get busy! First things first, the compressor. I got the compressor set up a bit, and ready to use for this. I am in fact going to be doing the shop in the up coming weekend, days, etc. I found out I do have to get a dedicated line for the compressor. It's just too much pull on a line with other stuff on it. So, that will happen. I guess I'm going to need a bigger box then I wanted originally.

I did manage to do my first video, in a while, on the comparison of the old vs new compressors. Night and day comparison. Check it out.

I am planning on doing a couple of things. First things first I'm planning to get a decent camera for video as well as pictures. I may continue to take pics with my S3 phone, but I need a dedicated camera to do this stuff, and specifically videos. I am looking at reasonably priced cameras with HD capabilities as well as a mic that will do well with bass. I hear Sony Cybershots do well, but I'm also looking at some Samsungs etc. too. So any suggestions would be very welcomed.

There will be much more video in the upcoming build. I'm not Mr. Meade, or Mark from CAF, but I'll get some build video and some explanation etc in there as well. And there's always pics too.

Speaking of pics, lets get to it.

Not a great deal of update, but I had to take a step backward to get moving forward.

First some new toys and equipment.

Got these little guys from Dre. Wonder what these could be for! I already have a set for the 1100.4. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, guess you'll have to wait and see.

New Air Saw for the new compressor!

Blades

Nice and compact. Feels great!

I absolutely hate this safety peg, whatever you wanna call it. It's a pain in the ass. I wanna be able to grab the saw, push the lever and it work. Not have to worry about pressing down some safety switch! So that's going to have to go.

How it works. in the up position if you press the lever, that stops it from turning on.

So you press the metal thing down, and then you can press the lever. Pain in the ass!!

Onto the amp rack. This just wasn't sitting well with me so I decided I was going to cut it off, and replace it with a wood piece and then glass around it. You can see how bad and uneven it is.

Back side view, it's very rough. Recall I had nothing to really hold it up. So that's why it failed.

Remember that I was going to just use filler and smooth it out and make it look good. After taking this long to get back to work on it, and thinking about it, that just wasn't "my way" of doing things. So true to form I decided to fix it the right way.

[scooter99]

Made some initial marks. But let's get it in the trunk and see where we're at.

You can see the gap behind it. That's space that's much needed and quite frankly it's so tight in there that I can use every eighth of an inch as I can get.

So after looking at it in there I decided the whole back wall needed to go. Cut it out completely then replace it the right way! Time to use the new saw!

Back wall gone!

Just a little view of how thick it was with filler. It's pretty heavy actually. So I'm happy to be doing this now. That's about 3/8" right there at the widest point. That's a lot of space to be loosing, on top of the space behind it that I was loosing. Should give me some good breathing room. I'll get about half of that back.

Now to clean it up. I bought this last year, so now I get to use it on my new compressor. Let's see how it does.

What I'm cleaning up is the top edge of the rack. Don't care much about the end of it yet. I'll address that though later on when I need to.

Nice, a little 80 grit and some love, and she's flat and good to go.

another view, closer up.

Some spots that are a little thin. That'll get taken care of when I replace it. NOW, to the trunk!!

[scooter99]

My tools of choice to make my template. Knife, tape (may not be needed), pencil, and some cardboard. We actually just bought some new furniture for the new remodeled room, so I had some nice thick couch cardboard. Nice and sturdy. Perfect for this.

Traced it out to the end of the amp rack. This will give me the ability to just get the other areas dialed in because the bottom is fine.

Perfect fit

Closer view

So here you can see, it's a much straighter piece. But there's still too much gap behind it. So I'll do some trimming and get it to sink in better. My goal is to have it sit flat against the back.

Trimming some more. Went from a straight piece to cutting out around a couple of grooves on the sides.

Here is why. These spots on the sides, round out bigger then the level of the back.

Other side.

Pretty tight fit on the bottom, and there's another round out there that needs to be cut out, or possibly.

Trimmed a little more for a cleaner edge. Probably being too perfect on it, but that's me.

Cut that bottom part out, it was pushing the piece out a little bit.

Trimmed a little more on the other side.

[scooter99]

And this is the final piece. I apparently forgot to take an over head view.

Time to make it wood! I'm going to get some more 1/4" wood. This is pretty warped and it's in pretty rough shape. I'm going to be making lots of templates, so probably not a bad idea to get some new straighter stuff. I may get some smaller sheets so they're easier to handle.

Got my cardboard all traced onto the wood. Ready to go.

I didn't use the air saw on this, I used my trusty electric jig saw on this one.

After some test fitting it still needed a bit of trimming. The cardboard does flex a little so it makes for a difficult template, or final one anyway.

After a little more test fitting, I decided the edges needed some trimming on the amp rack now. So I marked where that needed to be done. Then shaved it off with the sander and the 80 grit.

This is a much tighter fit. It's actually able to go all the way back flush against the back wall. Much better than the last one, and even better than the template. This gained me almost a full half inch.

View from the back seat. This will be much better. I'm kind of giddy at this point to be honest, while taking the picture anyway. And it only gets worse as the night goes on.

this is just the tape and getting ready to tape things off.

After doing that, and getting the rack back in, and ready to glass, I noticed that there wasn't anything behind the corners to glass to. So I decided to use some more of the orange fleece to fill those in.

Like so! Fills in the corners nicely and will work well for a first coat.

Close up of the driver side

Close up of the passenger side. Now, we're ready to glass!

So like a lot of folks do, I didn't obviously take pics while glassing. No resin on the phone!! So I layed down a nice layer of resin on the seam and the fleece. Soaked it pretty good. Then while I still had some left, I went ahead and laid down a layer of chop. then soaked that all in.

Ripped up some more chop and got it in place.

And got another coat of resin down. So that's 2 layers of chop all the way across and a layer of fleece in the corners.

View of the passenger corner

View of the driver side corner.

Much much better than the original. I'm very very pleased at how this came out.

This is really what made me decide to get new 1/4" material. Even as straight as I thought the ply was, you can see it's a little warped. Even for this small piece. I noticed it before I put it on, but there wasn't much I could do about it, and I didn't have time to go get more.

Also had an issue with the resin. My 3m resin isn't good anymore. Clumpy and stringy. Hard to explain but it's time for new, bottom line.

So that's it for now. I'm going to go an put an order in at US Composites and in the meantime I'll get the filler out and start getting this thing back to ready for finishing. More to come very soon!

Again, if someone has a suggestion on a camera that will do 1080 HD video and has a good mic for bass, as well as being relatively reasonably priced, I'm happy to listen.

Also check out and like the facebook page to get your chance to win a lanyard. The page is linked in my signature.

If you wanna see the pictures and not the chatter, check out the UBL which is also linked in the page.

My goals are to be playing and close to done by September 20, 2013. That's not far away. Not sure if that's gonna happen or not, but we'll see. Things are going to start happening fast folks. Hang on tight, it's gonna be a ride for sure! WOOT!

[Twostrokeking]

Lovin the updates man!! Much better then it was before. Im glad you replaced it. Your attention to detail is awesome

[soundstream15]

well im tuned in.

this build is sick and very smart, the work you do makes me wonder like what the hell is he building and then it turns out and im like ahh i see lol really makes me want to get better bc i would love to do the work you do or half that. really loving it bud

[Trey_Dog650]

Woot looks good man. Cleaned up that back wall very nicely for sure.

Can't wait for more

[scooter99]

Lovin the updates man!! Much better then it was before. Im glad you replaced it. Your attention to detail is awesome

Thanks. I'm glad too. Detail is everything. Even in the prepwork. Thanks for noticing.

well im tuned in.

this build is sick and very smart, the work you do makes me wonder like what the hell is he building and then it turns out and im like ahh i see lol really makes me want to get better bc i would love to do the work you do or half that. really loving it bud

Very humbled by your appreciation. Thanks for being here.

Woot looks good man. Cleaned up that back wall very nicely for sure.

Can't wait for more

Thanks Mike. I hope I can get back to it very soon.