01 Explorer (2) AT Strato 18s in a 4th

[slammedincouch]

1200 at 2 ohms on good voltage, easy choice: Crescendo BC2k or AQ/SQ 2200. And if that's an XL, a BC2k would be a great match for it

Sad to see you have that though, because the wall looks killer.

Close! Lvl 5 M1 15. Gonna see how she moves on the m1c, but yeah it was a lot of work I pretty much have to toss away due to my iffy suspension and not enough power after rise- I bet if I had a bigger amp on them or redesigned the box, it'd be even harder to pull them out, but they'll probably sit for a year or so until I find something to use them in. Can't even find someone with a hatch opening large enough to fit the box in who has 18s or wants to try the stratos, which is super frustrating too.

For now, I'm going to try to stay positive and say I'll have some of my trunk back and less worry about replacing unwanted suspension parts until after winter.

[slammedincouch]

Small update for the day...

Couldn't remember how to get that bad boy outta there...

Eventually though...

Should have a box design by Friday ready to go. Update on the Stratos: guy locally wants to check them out, but won't buy them without a box that will fit in his cargo area- the 4th is too tall, so I'm hoping to just get a cheap design thrown together for a 12ft^3 ported box to send the guy off with/I really want to see how they sound in another enclosure type.

[slammedincouch]

Small update for the day...

R.I.P. 4th order...we hardly knew yee...

Really sad to see it go, but happy to see my suspension back. Gonna probably try to salvage some of the pieces for beauty panels...think there's about 3 in there I can cut down and work with.

Truck is back together- all interior panels and seats have been reinstalled.

Box is getting there...that part should be finished up by tomorrow hopefully. The cargo area beauty panels and the sub baffle are probably going to take me around 1-2 weeks to do. i'm still playing around with some of the ideas I had for it and I want to make sure this setup suits me before I build it in all the way.

[baaudio]

Explorers can get loud no wall with a little effort. My girlfriend is doing 148.0 in hers with a single 15 RE MT on a Crossfire 1700 with two batts and stock alt

[slammedincouch]

Explorers can get loud no wall with a little effort. My girlfriend is doing 148.0 in hers with a single 15 RE MT on a Crossfire 1700 with two batts and stock alt

Sounds like a pretty nice setup. I'd be happy with a 140 for this setup. Going more for something that will sound good and look nice for my daily.

Another small update- got this done earlier today, unsure if I'll get more time to work on it later.

Got the port altogether

Sprayed the port with primer- not sure if I want to leave it this way, spray it black, or spray it silver (truck interior is grey, equipment is black, and accent on all of it is silver, so it's a tough decision).

And port is in and lifting. Put some saw dust and glue between everything for now and will add caulking over it once it dries. Only things left: glue the 45 in the port, glue and screw the top baffle, and caulk the whole box up. Then I can do some testing and get started on the beauty panels

Also update on the stratos: got the design in today for the new box on those- going a little smaller than most ported boxes with them to see how they do, but it's still within what AT recommends for them. Trying to decide if I'm going to keep them or sell them. Guess I'll figure that out after I get some play time on the 5.

[slammedincouch]

Threw in a couple extra man hours tonight to get this thing done. Mostly just 20-30 minutes of work followed by an hour of rest time to let things dry aka not a lot of work that was left to do, just time consuming:

I typically give the caulk about 12+ hours of dry time (that's what she said)- I absolutely hate the smell of it- it's like vinegar mixed with the feeling of burning nostril hairs when I get a whiff of it from sticking my head in the box trying to make sure it's applied evenly. Should have some testing done by tomorrow night/Friday morning. If she passes the approval checklist, then it's onward to the beauty panels or off to cl and the start of another build...hoping it's not the latter.

[slammedincouch]

Got the box and sub into the explorer today, but by the time I got everything in and the amp all set, I ha to jet. Tomorrow I'll get some testing in. From the few moments I had with it, it seemed to be decently loud. Nowhere near flexing the crap out of it with the M1c hooked up, but still enjoyable and louder than the stratos off 500watts in the 4th/9012 setup. I'll try and get some videos up if my flip is charged or I can find another one of my old video cameras.

For now, here's a pic of the box. Put some body filler on the screw holes in the front and THINK I finally have an idea of what I'm going to be doing with the cosmetics and beauty panels.

[slammedincouch]

Had a little time to work on the build today. Pretty much at this point, I'm just trying to get everything in and playing and then worrying about the fine tuned stuff later i.e. beauty panels and cleaning up all my wires.

So anyone who owns an 01 explorer or some other stupid cars has the damn wiring harness issue when trying to run new speaker wire...

this is literally the only thing that runs into the door sooo

had to drill into it- got a little sloppy, but I've been "advised" by the geezers in my neighborhood to not take the door off the hinge/unbolt anything, etc. That being said, nobody will help me pull the door off and I don't have any room to work in the garage atm. So attempting to drill at an angle and hope for the best is my best option right now. Got the door fine:

And now I need to get the inside of the door jam done, but my drill batteries died...so I'll be working on that tomorrow. For the remainder of the time I had to work, I pretty much stuck to deadening the doors I have yet to deaden with my meh deadener (but it was cheap, so yolo still).

I got really hungry half way in, so I still have a lot to go tomorrow.

Started to play around with the port loading by accident as well. I had this cool idea for the amp rack, but it's going to require me to move the box up about 6 inches. I really like where it sits right now- height it perfectly aligned with below the seats and window line once I get the flush baffle on.

Anyways I originally had the start of the port 16 inches from the hatch and I came up with another idea for where the amps will go and how they'll be mounted that won't require me to lift the box. So just to test fit everything, I moved the box towards the hatch and gave the port a little over 7 inches from the hatch. Wanted to check to see if it made any difference in output or cause any issues with it being closer to the hatch. Fired her up and BOOM- output was like night and day in terms of how loud she was playing. She sounds A Lot louder with the port unloading closer to the hatch. I was happy with where I had it to start, but I was Impressed with the amount of output I'm getting off of the M1c.

It makes me wonder about how the Stratos would be in the ported enclosure I have sitting here waiting to be built, but I only want to build it if I'm selling them to someone local/I still don't like how warm my amp runs at .5 even after all the rise. We'll see though, maybe I'll get bored in a few weeks, build it, and check out how it does at 2ohms. Any who, here's a picture of the box and where the M1c is now/ WIRE SPAGHETTI.

More updates to follow.

[slammedincouch]

I have had a ridiculously terrible past few days with the build. Just bad luck after bad luck after bad luck...

so I took a break from beauty panels, finished up deadening the doors and started getting to the door speakers.

so first issue of the week- the DD CS 6.5s

the xovers I have for the set are only for the tweeters...

Run the mids active? NP. I have the perfect amp to pair them with. But the tweets...Only option is to run them off the hu power ("50watts" per channel)

So while I'm trying to sleep on thurs night, I decided I wanted to use something else in the doors- something that I have passive xovers for because I don't want to run active without a good active hu (my 80prs is in the maliboom and I need to have the double din in the explorer- it's just too convenient)

Wake up on thursday and it was time to get busy on my trunk lid

Anybody recognize dat comp se? Yup it's my HSK 165s from way back when. Super pumped to get them installed. I power up the hu, test the side I have everything drilled into and it sounds like it's going to be great! So I go to get the other mid down from the lid to test on the other side and guess what?

I was legit so upset. I have no idea what happened to it. The only thing I can conjure up what happened was that when the xbox was originally installed, it blew the mid. When we put it in, there was no way to control the volume and when it turned out it was ridiculously too loud. This was god knows how long ago- showing you how much I really use that xbox in my trunk. Eventually I put an rca volume knob on it, but it must have gone before then and I just never noticed.

I decided there's no use crying over spilled milk and decided I'm going to have to send it in to see how much it's going to cost to get fixed once I have another job.

So then I scraped the idea of doing a passive setup and went back to the idea of active mids. I'm to the point of putting the last screw in the mid to the door and BAM, my hand slips, screw driver punctures right through the surround in my brand new cs 6.5 mid. I started yelling and shouting and pretty much throwing a tantrum/kicking myself for allowing it to happen. Mid plays fine, but this it the first time I've EVER been careless enough to puncture a surround. I don't have pcitrues of it, just because I'm trying to forget it happened...

So finally, I'm here:

And now I'm just trying to decide what I'm doing. I HAD everything hooked up and working, but I feel like the tweeters are barely audible (they aren't, but I hate the idea of HU power.) I contemplated using the crescendo 1000c4 for the mids on ch 1 and 2 and tweets on ch 3 and 4, but the hpf doesn't go past 1khz...so that's a no. The C1B goes to 5khz, but I feel like the crescendo is just going to waste in the install/I don't really have room for it in the build's amp rack.

Tomorrow I SHOULD just put the tweets back on hu power, but instead, I'm going to grab one of my 2 channel old school amps out of another car and see how it sounds on the tweets. If it sounds good, I'm just a set of rca's and a fuse holder short of powering them.

Hopefully good news to follow in the next two days...

[slammedincouch]

It's been a while since i last updated this thread soo0o0o let's see

Found an amp for my tweets, decided to go with my OS alpine 3542 (60x2)

Haven't built an amp rack still because I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do for my substage. The lvl5 is nice and all, but I still just want to see what the Stratos will do in a regular slot ported box. I tried selling them locally, but either nobody wanted them without an enclosure, the 4th was too big (before I tore it down), or the person who wanted them didn't want to pay for 2 sheets of MDF for me to build a box for them (this one was the most frustrating of all)

So I said fohgettabout it and had Antonio aka Catman design me up a quick box for them. Ended up going with 9.6 net ft^3 tuned to 32hz for the box- went a little smaller because Coleman in one of the caco threads said that the 18s would do nice in 4.5-5 ft^3, so fuggit I'll try it.

Because nobody would pay for me to build the box and also because I'm not about to go spend money on 2 sheets of wood when I'm not even certain IF I'm going to keep the subs, I decided to make a "Recycled box." By that I mean I took all the pieces I could still somewhat use from the 4th order build, cut them down ,and reused whatever I could from it. The only real semi-raggity pieces were the sides- they were pretty torn up, but still useable. any extra holes from screws have been filled in with titebond/saw dust paste.

Got all the wood cut yesterday and picked up a buttload of glue

Started tossing the box together today. I've been working for the past 5-6 hours on it

Test fitting the top baffle- I should have gone about .25" more towards the ends with the baffle cutout, but I'm not going to waste any wood I don't need to for a box that I'm not sure if I'm keeping. The subs fit in there, they're just super close/baskets basically touch.

Used 4" worth of stacked wood to get the port and front level and even for 4 inches of port throughout

anddd she's done. Just need to get some titedust paste on the inside corners, drill out holes for the bolts to wire the subs up, and then toss in the subs. I should be testing them tomorrow. Decided that I'm going to just wire them up to a 2ohm load on the m1c and give them rated power- they should do decent between the power and enclosure, so I guess we'll see tomorrow. If I decide to keep them, then I'll probably carpet and stickerbomb the box. Stay tuned for testing tomorrow.