Installing Rear 6x9” Speakers Thursday, September 10, 2009

So tonight I started on the rear 6x9” speakers while Vinnie started piecing back the parts of the engine we had to take apart to get to the gearbox etc. The speaker holes are ruined at the back and the mounts that are inside the section are also wrecked. The plastic has been melted away and in the process it made it impossible to install speakers that were stock or the same size as stock so we decided to get some 6X9” speakers and mount them ourselves. There were also holed that had previously been drilled around where the speakers have been which are annoying and we will have to find something to fill them with. So our original idea of making spacers didn’t work because the speaker didn’t allow for much space, it seemed like alot of effort and it would look alot cleaner if we could just mount them normally. So I made a stencil outlining the edge of the speaker, the screw holes for the speaker and where the frame goes back (to make sure there is enough room for the whole speaker to be in the back of the whole and not pop out. After I cut the right size with the dremel, I used some tin snips to cut away at the metal speaker frame and the melted plastic spacer that was behind where the speaker mount was. This sacrificed the stock way of mounting speakers in the rear but because it was already ruined and we had to install 6x9” to cover the mess they made, there wasn’t much lost. After all that was cut away, I soldered on the connections to the speaker as well as to the terminals that were left behind from the previous speaker. These terminals plugged into the connection for the speaker so for the rears, we didn’t have to cut off the stock connections. Then we mounted the speakers by drilling small holes and then screwing the screws into the plastic as well as metal support clips to make the join stronger and hold the speaker in place. By doing all this, it was the best way that we could make sure that if we, or someone else who buys this car wants to change the speakers it will be easy considering how they were.

After we screwed one in we turned on the radio on but the speaker didn’t work :( I called it quits for the night and so I’ll look at it tomorrow and find why there is no sound coming out.

So here’s a few pictures showing what happened and what it looks like now with the 6x9”s. There’s a tiny bit of patching we will have to do just to clean the whole thing up.