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Loud & Low 8th Gen Civic UBL #2


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Ok so this is my new UBL for the civic. The last UBL can be found here and that one has a lot of the performance part of my car build in it. The second part of it is some audio, and some stuff that was going to happen and stuff that just never did happen.

I've got a new plan now, since we're keeping the car, and so I decided it only fitting to start a new UBL. When it's all done, I'll probably add the performance portion of it at the end to make a complete build log of it. But for now, all audio!

So here we go. The build log portion of this where you can see all the talking, suggestions, comments, and banter is linked in my signature. Feel free to come hang out, comment and join us in there.

Just a little disclaimer about myself, and my builds. I don't build to show you a finished product and say "oh this is what I started with, and this is what I finished with". That's like having an Oreo with no filling! I like to give you the cookie and the cream. Noone learns anything if I show you where I start and where I finished at without the good and bad in the middle. That's what I'm all about. I'm not a professional, I'm not even an audio expert! I'm a hobbyist and that's the way I like to do things. I don't have the best ways to do these installs, but I don't mind giving something a try and seeing how it goes, depending on the cost of course. I think out side of the box, and try to build outside of the box. I don't build something because everyone else will like it, I build it because I like the thought of it. And you telling me that it can't be done, only makes me want to try more!

I do love to research but at the same time I like to have answers to questions and then understand why that's the way it works. I don't want to ask how to get from a to c without knowing why and how to get through b. Make sense? Good!

Ok sit back and enjoy the ride! I'm ready to have some fun, how bout you!?! HERE we go!

I did start some of this on the other UBL, but I'm going to go ahead and quote most of it from the build log itself to get you caught up. After that, when I post pictures, I'll post them directly here.

Ok so here's the deal. I was doing a build on this before, and here's a little back ground. My wife and I have been going back and forth for about a year now trying to decide if it's in our best interest to sell this car or keep it. Well after all that back and forth and "we're for sure selling it" to "now we're keeping it" and back and forth, we've decided finally to keep it. We'll have it paid off next year and we're getting by just fine with what we have.

BUT, this works finally for me cause I know that I can now plan a final system in it and get building! That's what I'm doing now.

I've been working with Dre (Ibleedmusik) and Jon Rabe (skyhighaudio) with this build and some of the particulars and planning of it. I want to thank them for their help and constant working with me. I can be a bit crazy and over the top at times and they help reel me back into reality. But what everyone should know by now, is I'm not a typical run of the mill idea guy! I like to be out of the box, or just off the other side of normal and easy. But that all being said this is going to be fun. I have a sketch up of the plan, and I have some stuff built already, but not much. I'm about 98% of where I need to be equipment wise. SO we're about there as far as getting this thing going.

Here's my last build and where I left off: 06 Civic Build

I do have a UBL from the last build, and I'm going to go ahead and leave that up and add to it cause it has all my performance build pics on it, and it's not that long. SO, I'll be linking that in my signature and you can follow along there as well if you don't want to hear all the talk in here.

Most likely, like that one, this one is going be a long thread. I like to make sure that I have all you guys with me along for the full ride. I do experiment with some different things and some fail and some work. But along the way, you guys see it so if you want to try it as well, you can see what works and what fails and can comment on things to try on the things that fail.

Ok enough rambling, I'll be back in a few minutes with some pics! Stay tuned, here we go!


So if you were with me in the end of the last thread, you knew that I was in an accident back in October. October 22nd to be exact!

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Some jackass decided he didn't want to turn left anymore and went from the left turn lane into my lane, which I just so happened to be occupying at the time. Could've been worse but still sucked either way.

Well in the meantime we'd decided to keep the car, as noted above, and I started building my stockpile while the car was in the shop. It went in on October 22nd. Well here we are, on December 1st, and I just got it back last night. Still have some problems with it, and it's going to go back for sure.

Problems:
Biggest problem is the paint doesn't match. The two doors and rear quarter panel are lighter than the front panel and bumper. This is not even subtle and I can't believe they missed it. Here's a pic:
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Second problem is the driver door window. It's off track or tweeked or something, cause I have auto up and down feature on the window. Well it goes down just fine, but when it goes back up you can see it twist a little about 4" before closing and it stops and goes back down. It has a safety feature on it so no hands or heads or whatnot get caught in there. So that has to be fixed.

Third problem is the alignment that was "perfect" is NOWHERE NEAR perfect! It pulls hard to the left!

That's all I could find at the moment and I've not really had time to look at it better but those are the things that stand out to me.

Now to the good stuff. When the took these doors off, and the rear quarter panel, I lost my sound deadener. They are going to pay me for new, along with time for labor to put it on. Nice couple hundred bucks in my pocket for that.

Then the rear wheel also looked damaged at first, but after a detail, it's only got a little scrape on the wheel outter lip. I can fix that myself, so they're going to still comensate me for the replacement of the wheel. Another couple hundred in my pocket!

So that will be nice considering I have deadener here to replace the old stuff, and I have the stuff to fix the wheel as well since I already did two others. Still undecided if I want to keep these or get new ones anyway. Down the road!

So now we're back on track with the build. So lets get to the equipment. You can see it in my signature but here's what's going in!

Samsung Galaxy 10.1 Tablet:
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Samsung 10.1 Desk Dock swapped with a 7.0 Dock with HDMI output:
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Octava HDMI Converter:
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Alpine CDA-9886
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2 - Crescendo FT-1 Tweets (running 1 per front door at 4ohms)

These were taken when I had the old soundstream stuff and decided to change it up. I'll get better pics of the tweets alone.

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4 - Crescendo PWX8 8's (running 2 per front door at 2ohms)

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DC Audio XL15 D1 Sub: (This may change as I'd love to run a Level 5 in a 4th order, but I have to sell this and it's partner first before I can do that, so I will continue on this way until that happens. If it doesn't I'll sell it's partner, pay off my debt, and be happy with this. But for now this is the plan.)

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Crescendo c1100.4

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Project DB 1/0ga to 4 ga reducers for power and ground on 1100.4 (overkill? Yes maybe, but that's ok)

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Crescendo bc3500d

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Project DB Dual inputs for power and ground on 3500d

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XS Power D6500d x 2 for rear power

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XS Power D???? (undecided yet)

Lots of power equipment, there's more than this, I just forgot to picture it all:

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Forgot these too. Ebay volt meters

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Also I have a ton of Stinger cable. 1/0 ga, 4 ga, 8ga, and twisted 16ga speaker wire.

So that's the equipment list for the most part. I'm sure I forgot a piece or two.

Here's the basic design for the trunk. Sketch up of course!

The enclosure runs approx 3.7-3.8 cu ft, port area per sq in is around 15.8, and tuned around 34hz. Front facing, toward the back seat, and will be sealed off.

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Trunk side amp and battery rack:

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and I've since changed the fuse panels on either side from this:

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to this:

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This new one will have the same plexi cover like the older design, but will clean up the cables a bit better and have the ground cables in there as well, where as the old design did not.

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This is where I started actually doing stuff on the extension. Testing basically.

So here's where I'm at with the Alpine Face Plate Extension Project.

I got the head unit out of the truck tonight and just started looking at stuff and getting some ideas on how to tackle this project.

My oldest daughter was a little jealous, bless her heart cause her sister got to be on a picture in the build. So she wanted in on one as well!

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So I got everything laid out, all my pieces to this puzzle.

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Put the face plate on the unit and examined the contacts a little bit. Here is the close up on them.

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You can see on this one, that there is a little tab on either side of the contact connector. This is key cause the contacts really only go in one way smoothly. The other way it goes in, but it's kind of forced. So this is a good thing for orientation purposes!

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With this connector, you can see the top connectors extend down, and the bottom connectors aren't so extended. This is another helpful piece of info for orientation!

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This is just a view of back of the female connector and the top of the male connector.

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Showing them connected

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Same basic thing, just roles reversed this time.

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Connected

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This just shows how the connector will go into it's spot

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Both of the base plates. The top one is the new piece and then you see the connector in front. After looking a bit at it, I may change out the one on the unit cause it's a little worn. The one for the faceplate to be held on, doesn't need to do anything but hold the faceplate. The base unit one, needs to be moved if I need to put in a cd. Anyway, moving on.

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Now it's time to get our color chart and wires all situated so I have a guide to go off of. No reason to mess something up by guessing right.

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Now that I have that going on, lets take a look at the wires and colors

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I wrote down colors as I thought they should go. But then I discovered later that they had numbers on the wires. So I changed the color code later.

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Here's what's in each cable. Remember there's 8 cables in the main run. So each pair per cable equals 16 little wires. There's 16 contacts on each plug. Make sense now!

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So after looking at the female connector I wondered what it looked like in the unit. So I decided to take the front off and look for myself.

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To my surprise this is what I found. I don't know exactly what I was expecting but I thought I'd have a ribbon cable or something in there. It's a board that has another plug on it, that plugs into a female plug that's soldered on the main board. WOW.

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This is how it's soldered to the board.

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So I started stripping, wire that is!

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One down, one to go

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Two down.

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Ok so last night I was able to fire up the soldering iron and get the head unit extension all finished up and working! Well, sort of! Here's how it went down!

First I got everything out and started working on it, pretty much where I left off from last time. Recall that everything was stripped off and ready to solder on the wires. Now my original plan was to just solder from the outside in, meaning I was going to lay the wires on to the tabs and solder them on and then bend them and do the other side. After looking at them for a bit, I decided that these tabs were just not strong enough to really do that. I decided the up most care was needed in the soldering and handling of the connector tabs. So to solve that and get that result, I decided that the best thing to do, would be to bend the wires in an "L" shape and solder them that way, and then when they go on the tabs, they'll be resting on the strongest part of the tab, which is not the wing, but the body of each tab. So that's where I started. I needed to tin each little wire. 8 pairs, twice = 32 wires! Actually kind of went pretty quickly! Check it out!

Before tinning

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Just to see the plan, if it'll work better!

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Time to solder

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Same here, pre tinning

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Now I started to solder the wires to the tabs. But I pulled these wires off.

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Rather than try to fight space all the way down, I'm blind already and I was wearing my glasses, but my head was killing me after looking at this stuff for a while in crappy light! So I tried to make it a little easier on myself by doing it from the bottom up instead of the top down.

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It's a little rough right now.

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But I can clean that up!

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Now it's time to move on to the next connector. I actually found this one tougher than the first one. These tabs seemed thinner and more brittle than the other one. I decided to do the same thing with these. "L" shaped wire from the inside. Also from the bottom up.

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Again a little rough and then cleaned up! BTW, I don't claim to be the best solderer in the world, I'm still learning. So if anyone thinks they can give any suggestions as to how to better my solder joints, I"m all ears! Thanks! Moving on!

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Soldered up and ready for some support and connection.

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Got out the hot glue gun and started filling the wires up and this will help support the weight of the wires and prevent the soldered tabs and bare wires from touching.

Side one

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Side two

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Now to move a little up the wires for more support. Once again, it's not the cleanest, which if you all know me by now is driving me nuts, but like I said a bit earlier my head was killing me, and I was getting impatient with these connectors. No excuse to let the details get away from me I know, but it's what I'm using for this now.

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Ready to put it in it's home.

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What you'd see if I took the face plate off. Looks factory! I compared it to the one from the factory, and it's the exact same distance, which is flush. I'm happy with it.

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Wires supporting themselves and the connector and base.

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Now, on to the next one! Same thing done here, I'll just post pics, you get the idea.

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