Loud & Low 8th Gen Civic UBL #2

[scooter99]

Next it was time to put my new toy together, and then put the tools away! Well mostly away. Can't put it all away until I get the other side done. Alot of it is going to go over there, and I have plans for the rest too.

Bam! Aside of the horrible amounts of grease that was on it in the packaging, I mean really is that necessary!! It's not bad. I can hardly wait to use it! I have a band saw in my sights too. Don't need anything huge, just a little something to do little stuff with!

Threw a couple pieces of ply on the wall so I could keep my straight edges, levels, t squares etc. Simple and effective!

Tool time!

So that's about it. I have big plans, for the other side. I want to build another bench, just can't have too many benches. But what I want to really do, and I'm going to work on the design now, is make a part of the bench that's removable on wheels. It will house my router table, and my table saw. Maybe have them housed in a cabinet under the table. But be able to wheel it out, and if I need a table outside, then I'll have a cover to go over it so I can just use it as a table to build a box, or do some glass work, or anything else on.

Also need to build shelves over the workbenches, so I have more shelving, and also so I can put lights under them so I have plenty of lighting on the workbench areas.

Big plans for this shop. But this is all going to help me in the future for this build and any other builds I may have in the future.

More to come, Thanks for checking it out.

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For the behind the scenes chatter and to comment on this, check out my build log, linked in my signature.

[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.

Also for behind the scenes chatter and for comments or suggestions, check out my build log which is linked in my signature. Thanks!

[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.

[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.

[scooter99]

I apparently forgot to take pics of the goodies that I got this weekend, so I'll make sure to do that tonight and get those posted up.

I didn't get much as far as pics from the Sky High trip this weekend. But I had to do a vs pic, with the Sky High Truck and my civic. Check em out!

Peek A Boo!!

Literally half way under the truck.

Kyle and Laura were nice enough to think of me while at DC Audio this weekend, and gave me a lanyard from DC. Then Jon gave me a nice SHCA one. I don't usually have stuff on my rear view mirror, but i put those up there, and well, they just look at home there. So maybe they'll stay!

Wasn't there for very long, well long enough to help with the new stuff that had just come in, and then did some running around and just bsing. But I'm sure I'll be up there real soon again. Big things going on up there.

[scooter99]

So while I had the soldering Iron out the other night doing the harness up, I decided to keep it out and make a pair of coaxial rcas. i had said before sometime that i was going to do a little tutorial on this, so I guess here that is.

Got my gear set up and ready to work. Coaxial cable, 2 RCA ends, solder station, heat shrink, techflex, etc.

Solder station and heat gun

First thing you do is strip the outer (black in this case) jacket. I did this with a knife cause I couldn't find my coaxial cable stripper. But i would not recommend doing it this way. So jacket stripped, braided outer shield pulled down.

I usually will put the RCA in the helpers hands and fill it up with solder. That way when it's time to put the cable in the center cup, it's ready to heat and sink right in.

Soldered up the center pin, and I also put a little on the forks to get a solid connection on the outer shield. You have to be extremely careful here, because you don't want to melt the jacket and risk going too deep. Little heat, in little spurts I've found works best. You don't need a lot of solder here, just a little. Too much build up will also not allow the outer barrel to go over it.

Another thing I do with my rca's is separate the heatshrink. Actually i know alot of people don't even use heat shrink on these. Not a great idea. I do it, and I separate them.

Center pin shrinked and making sure that no fibers from the outer shield are in the shrink. This isolates the center pin from the outer shield.

Then I shrink the outer shield and overlap it on the center pin shrink. This isolates them and gives a nice protection for the whole thing.

Then slide the outer barrel on and screw it down.

Now you can dress it up if you like. I decided to get a little creative with this one, but you can use one color or do it this way or however you want. I want to make sure that the pair can be separated and know what's what by looking at the flex on it. So I like to usually use different flexes on the different cables.

I used black flex on the main run of the wire, then terminated into the colored flex with heat shrink. This one is blue, with blue shrink. The other was a black with gold strip going through it with black flex.

[scooter99]

Next what you want to do, when you've done the other side, is test them to make sure you don't have any cross connection. Fibers touching the center pin and outer shield. Basically what you do is touch the center pin with your dmm probes, and if you get a reading, you have a good connection.

As you can see, with the probes not touching, with the setting I'm on, I get a 1 reading. Which is basically nothing.

So when we touch the center pin on one side, and the outer shield on the other probe, we get that same reading. This is good, and means we have no cross connections. So we're good with this one.

These are the final products. These were done pretty quickly. I usually will label them for whatever they're going to be used for. In this case they were just quick and for testing purposes on a build. Should really take you about 30-45 minutes per cable on these. That's about how long it takes me anyway. Now you can go install and enjoy!

So that's it for now. Like I said, I have some equipment pics to take and I'll do that tonight.

Probably going to be a few days before any more updates. I'm trying to get the garage cleaned up and boxes emptied this week so we can get our cars in the garage. So I'm gonna be busy this week with that. Hopefully more this weekend. Unless I can sneak out and get some stuff done on the amp racks !

Thanks for checking it out!

Don't forget to check out and like my facebook page to get updates before they hit anywhere else!

[scooter99]

Ok let's get started.

I brought home some goodies from SHCA last weekend. Some I got before hand but most I got when I was there.

Group shot!

Kylar brought me some aluminum for buss bars, with a nice message on it! LMAO

Mmmmmmmmm SHCA 1/0ga cable FTMFW!!!

Grabbed a couple fans too. Haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to work with these, but they're better than the small ones I have. I have an idea, but I have to figure out if it's going to work or not.

Some 8ga ring terminals and SHCA heatshrink, and yes those on the right say Remore Wire. Bad ass right!?!

Second pair of XP950's. That gives me 4 now, and I'm done with those until I get installed and playing. I'll decide after that if I need more or not. Would only increase one more pair anyway, otherwise I have nowhere to put them! LOL

Testing out of the box, 12.68v!

and 12.71v!!

But because i don't need them for a while, I thought I'd put them on the charger so that I can make sure they're topped off. I'll take this one off tomorrow morning, and then put the second one on and let it go tomorrow and tomorrow night.

More coming

[scooter99]

Also got this little beauty in. Wonder what it could be for? It's a sunglass holder out of an 06 Honda Accord, which is the exact match to the one in my 06 Civic, with the exception of the sunglass holder itself. So why in the world would I want the same light fixture, but with a sunglass holder.....................

Imagine in the roof

Hmmmmmmm

Ponder a bit.

So then that was about it for that stuff. But then I got to work today, and I had a package on my desk.

Yeah baby! A bunch of 12 pole barrier strips. I have a project on hold waiting for these to come in! Now I can get working on that one too. I have more stuff to go with this, but it's just relays, and connectors, and wire, etc. So Nothing really to show, but maybe I'll just take pics and show them anyway. But this isn't for my build, but just something I enjoy doing and I'm doing it for someone else's build. More on that another time!

So for now, that's about it.

I'm working on having a me day, cause I really want to just get out and enjoy the nice weather and get some build stuff done. But it's going to take some work to make it happen. So we'll see. Either way, look for some updates here very soon. I'm about to get on a roll!

Thanks for checking things out guys!

Remember to comment or follow along with the behind the scenes banter, check out my build log in my signature. Also check out the Facebook page for faster updates.