Hello all,

I'm getting all sorts of frisky these days and I'm trying to figure out a good way to put sub(s) in my LX as I slowly build my system. I have two crappy tens in a bandpass from my previous car, but I'm not too fond of the idea of hogging all my cargo area with subs.

Since this is my first new car, I want to do a clean custom job that I can be proud of.

Seeing outposts inspiring although unfinished thread has got me brewing ideas, also I happened upon this link http://web.njit.edu/~cas1383/proj/main/ about fiberglassing sub enclosures and I think I'm ready to experiment.

I kinda was thinking of putting a custom enclosure where outpost did his, but I think I'd like it more flush if possible, and I'm curious of I can squeeze an acceptable enclosure down there for a 10" sub, but maybe not... Or I'm trying to see if there is somewhere else clever where a custom sub box or two could fit without hindering the cargo room.

I'm really sad outpost never returned to wrap up his thread because I was really looking forward to the final product, so I guess I'll have to just forge my own path

Any thoughts/ideas/links would be appreciated.

Wow! this is really good information... :lol:

goodluck! 20 hours of molding for my VW...and I actually knew what I was doing!

I grew up in Southern California fiberglassing so if a young punk can do it, so can you, bonanz. :grin: It is time consuming and expect to throw away your first attempt.

As to fitting in a bigger woofer and making it more flush, good luck. If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the opposite. I'd create a whole new center console that flowed out of the dash all the way to the back of the front seats, making the entire cavity the woofer box. I'd probably use two 8" woofers then, either pointing sideways into the vehicle at the driver's and front passenger's legs or on the back of the box, firing towards the rear seats. Two 8" woofers will move as much air as an 11" one and will have a smaller footprint. They also will be snappier, giving you better midbass.

There is one other option you might want to explore. There is a third kind of speaker box beyond sealed and ported. It is called infinite baffle. It is where you don't put a speaker box behind the driver and just mount it on a large board. A huge air space behind the woofer is what you want in an infinite baffle box. A speaker mounted in the rear deck of a sedan is an example of an infinite baffle design. So is an in-wall speaker in a home. In each case, the trunk of the car or the air space between the wall studs are relatively unimportant. All you want to do is keep the air moved by the back of the speaker from reaching the front of the speaker. Otherwise you have no bass. This is why 6x9s perched on the rear deck of a car sound so terrible. There is no bass because it has all cancelled out.

In an Element, if you used an infinite baffle woofer (sometimes erroneously called "free air"), you could make the whole lower area of the dash your box. You wouldn't have to worry about sealing its back. All you'd want to do is seal the front, keeping air from leaking through. The cowl that went from the woofer back around the center part of the dash would accomplish part of that. You'd eliminate the factory sub box where I used it. Your fiberglassing job would begin with the custom cowl that the woofer mounted in. You could use the factory cowl as your starting point but you'd build out from there. You want to make sure you have as much air behind the woofer as you can get and also make it a goodly distance for the back wave of the woofer to travel before it made it around to the front. You'd have to seal up the lower part of the dash as well as you could, too, to make this possible. That would be interesting in the driver's and front passenger's areas but it would be necessary to make an infinite baffle design work.

Infinite baffle woofers are out of favor in cars now. They were a prominent design as little as a decade ago. Now people want woofers in small boxes. Assuming you can't find a woofer specifically designed for an infinite baffle box, you'd want to look for a woofer that liked a huge ported box with a big port. That would work. It's close enough.

Just a suggestion, more thinking out loud than anything else. I'm not sure an infinite baffle woofer would work well. Please take this post with a huge grain of salt. :)

thanks for the thoughts outpost.

a question about sealed enclosures: Can the drivers lead into the same space without affecting performance?

so could I have a box like this

X----------X
X X
X----------X


where the X's are teh drivers both using the same space? or would you need a barrier dividing them?

I'm not sure I understand your drawing but yes, subwoofer drivers can share the same box space. In fact, some people will argue it's better this way. You want to run your sub bass in mono then, but for subs that's just fine.

sorry my drawing is crude, but imagine it like a tube with the driver at each end. not saying thats any design idea, just trying to understand clearly. so if I made a setup like this I'd calculate the tube to have the appropriate volueme for one driver? (allowing for some space for magnets and the back of the subs)

I get you now. I would be careful of building your subs into a tube. Tubes have resonances.

A flute is a tube. So is pipe organ. In these cases we like resonances - they play music. In a subwoofer box, that can be a problem.

Let me give you an incredibly handy formula, bonanz, to use here. We'll use it again over in my thread when we get to voicing the system. There is an easy relationship between the length of a sound wave and its frequency. If we say the speed of sound is 1100 feet per second (that's close enough to the truth), we can use that fact to determine the length of a sound wave at a given frequency. Divide 1100 by the frequency you want and you get the length of the wave in feet. Equally useful is dividing 1100 by a given length to get the frequency of a wave of that length. Here are our two formulas:

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2005-1/940070/1100.jpg

So, let's say your tube is four feet long. Divide 1100 by 4 and you get 275. That means a 275 Hz wave is 4 feet long. If you remember your high school physics, that 4' tube will prefectly resonate at 275 Hz. Needless to say, we don't want your subwoofer box to resonate. What's good for a pipe organ is bad for a sub box. As 275 Hz is well outside the range a sub will work at, you might say who cares? The problem is a quarter wave will also resonate. In other words, a wave that is 16 feet long - the 4' tube is 1/4 of its length - will also resonate in that tube. 1100 divided by 16 equals 69. 69 Hz is right where we want a sub to work. A 4' sub tube would resonate something fierce at 69 Hertz. A subwoofer using a 4' tube would just go boom and not be tight in the bass at all.

Bazooka is the most famous company that has made subwoofer tubes work but Bazooka has never been know for accurate, deep bass. Their woofers have always sounded boomy to me. Now you know why.

OH man im glad someone else having same idea as I am, well I havnt thought it out just yet but I think I may have a harder time cause I have :

2 12" subwoofers and with it is a BIG BOX that takes up all the cargo space and its too tall, so if i open top hatch people will see the subwoofers right away. I dont want that.

I want it lower, waterproff cause sunroof is right above it, and to have some more space in the cargo area.

I also was thinkn of some sort of Plexiglass box with Neon lights and some ports. Box could be wide that reaches each end but I dont want it tall.

I also have one of those Cargo organizers which also reaches each end of cargo area, Id still like to keep it in my cargo area, I was thinkn of putting it ontop of the subbox someway. Well atleast when I have to go do some grocery shopping I could put it ontop of my box, not all the time.

If anyone could help with some ideas and pictures would be great.

Thanks All.

:)

I was thinkn of somthing like this maybe?? but I also would like to find a way to save some cargo space. Damn and im sure a custom subbox to save cargo area would cost alot of money.
:|

ok i'm not sure where "outpost" put his but this is where mine ended up. it takes up no space in the back and hits very well and SQ is nice as well.
http://www.oqcgp.com/albums/Jason-GlowinGTP-Anaka/DSC00702.jpg
enjoy

^ There you go, bonanz. That even looks like a Kicker 12" square woofer. To heck with a 10" girly man woofer. :grin:

Nice work, aka.

^ There you go, bonanz. That even looks like a Kicker 12" square woofer. To heck with a 10" girly man woofer. :grin:

Nice work, aka.

lol! :lol:

^ There you go, bonanz. That even looks like a Kicker 12" square woofer. To heck with a 10" girly man woofer. :grin:

Nice work, aka.
:grin:
you are correct it is a 12" L5.
600rms does wonders in an open cabin application... :twisted:
cheers, and thanks for the compliment :roll:

:grin:
you are correct it is a 12" L5.
600rms does wonders in an open cabin application... :twisted:
cheers, and thanks for the compliment :roll:

Nice i bet it does.

I got 2 12" woofers with 1,200 rms. I should get a custom license plate and called it BOOM BOX. lol
Id luv to put my woofers in a full plexiglass box with neon lights. :-D but for now i got this big box that takes up my cargo space :|

wow I like that a lot aka, I might try something like that with just a 10 though...

do you have any more pics? and is there anything about putting the sub in the 'armrest' that you don't like? like does it bother you while driving, or do backseat passengers not like it etc?

anything you'd do different if you were to do it again?