Making Hapy Sounds (Part 2)

Continuing on my post about putting some music into Hapy, today I will go through some if the fun of installing what I'm calling "version 1" of the fuller sound system into the microbus. At this point, I have a pile of components, a spool of speaker wire and a dream.

Front Speakers Physical Mounting
I really wanted to spare my door panels, but I could not figure out where the kick panels were supposed to go. So, I couldn't figure out how much space I had and where. I haven't had kick panels for years, and pictures on the interweb of them installed really didn't show how much backspace there was. Resigned, I went down the tried-and-true path of a door card installation. My cards were made of a thick MDF material rather than the waffle board that most cards are made of. I don't know if that's better or worse, it's just different. I believe the process would be the same regardless.

Since I am installing 5-1/4" speakers, the hole will be smaller than that. A quick look at the manufacturer's spec's tell me that I need a 4-1/2" diameter hole. We take a few measurements and determine that placing the center-point of the hole between 9 and 9-1/2 inches from the bottom of the door and 6 to 6-1/2 inches from the front. That would place the speaker entirely within the upside down trapezoid below the bottom of the window in the door. I picked 9-by-6 since that was easy to remember, and with a carpenters square marked the spot on the driver-side card. Then, I nabbed a compass from the kids school supplies, measured out a radius of 2-1/4" (radius = diameter/2) and marked the cut line on the card. Had I been less daring, I could have cut a piece of cardboard to match the shape of the lower door card and performed test-cuts on that until I had the location where I liked it. If you are using nice cards, I would encourage that.

I took the card, then, out of the bus, and tried to visualize how the hole would align with the trapezoid. It seemed right, so I set the card down, drilled a hole near the line and finished the hole cut-out with a hand drywall saw (it is straight and cuts as you push away rather than as you pull towards). Once cut, I cleaned the edge with a file. I have this knack of undercutting, leaving myself lots of edge cleaning, and this was another one of those. So, I had to file just to get the hole up to the line, and then clean it up. Once I was able to set the speaker in the hole, I test-fit the card. The hole was inside the trapezoid, but is was fairly front-ward as you can see in the picture to the right. I don't think it really matters so long as the hole is wholly inside the upside down trapezoid. I removed the card, set the speaker in and test fit again. Nothing speaker-related was touching anything other than the card. We had a winner. I transferred the hole placement onto the passenger door card, drilled, cut and shaped it until a speaker would fit and test fit the passenger side the same way.

They looked good. So, I checked to get the speaker top level, marked and started the mount holes. I set the speaker grill on and sent the screws through the grill and the speaker mount holes and on through the card until they were snug. I may swap out the screws for bolts with washers and locknuts (on the backside) in a future version. There's just something about depending upon the threads of a screw to hold speakers to a door card that just seems hinky.

Front Speaker Wiring
One of the reasons I didn't want to put speakers in the doors is the question of how to route the speaker wires. I've seen wiring jobs where the wires don't pass through the front edge of the door, rather they pass from between the card and the door, making a small loop of wire when the door shuts. I didn't want that. Fortunately, I had pulled the door light switches out of the A-pillars a few years ago to paint and never returned them (since they didn't do anything anyway). This put a square hole in the A-pillar. I didn't want to drill a hole in the door, and I didn't have to. There are vents along that edge. So, threading wire from the spool back from the front, the wires passed through the door light switch hole, up through a vent high in the front edge of the door, down the front channel in the door and below the support. I left myself about a foot of wire to which I attached the pigtail that came with the speakers. Then, it was a simple matter to plug the clips into the speakers and then re-install the door cards. The other end of the speaker wire was routed up over the air vents and dashboard supports, and routed over to the hole where the head unit usually would go, leaving them dangling.

Rear Speaker Physical Mounting
I loaded the 6x9 speaker boxes with 6x9 speakers, so the physical mounting was fairly routine, in that respect: wire the supplied wires in the box to the pigtails, plug the pigtails into the speakers, place the speakers in the hole, put on the grills, thread the screws through. Since the boxes are going to kind of float around for now, there isn't much else to do mounting-wise, though that may change as we drive around and discover what we need for locating them for sound as well as whether they need to be a-fixed for travel.

Rear Speaker Wiring
Back when I had run a bunch of wires from the rear of the bus, I bore a hole in the wall behind the drivers seat. I ran a pair of speaker wires through that hole back past the old fridge-turned-storage-cabinet (See From Fridge to Storage). From there, they ran along the floor with the other wires, up behind the air vents (and where the kick panels would be), over the dash supports to the general stereo area. I added some plugs to the wires leading to the speakers so they can be unplugged and the speakerbox can be plugged in. I set the speakers on the rock-n-roll bed and shifted to setting up the head unit.

As always seems to be the case, this got long again. To be fair, I was probably 4 or 5 hours into the work at this point, so it's not like I'm just spinning a big tale out of a tiny effort or anything. Anyway, I'll pick this up next week. Thanks as always, for following along-