CRX: Speaker enclosure in Jiggy...

[Robert K. Kuhn]

On 10:32 AM 07/04/02 +0000, EvlErn 69 said...

hi robert umm i was lookin at your page to see if you had updated it... well anyways i liked the idea of how you setup your speaker box... can you give anymore detail of doing it... are there any drawbacks ??? any more pics in process??

Drawbacks:

• You sacrifice your spare tire.
• Fiberglass is messy to work with.  The fumes can also be a bit toxic so for the first couple of days you should run with the windows open to help air it out.  Some argue that fiberglass is hard/difficult to work with.
• You will need to use a sub-woofer that can work in a sealed box.  You can go with a smaller 8 inch sub-woofer and port it.  A 10 inch sub-woofer is the largest you'll be able to stick in there.  12 inch will fit but there won't be enough air-space for it.

It's pretty straight forward as far as construction goes.  Laying the fiberglass cloth down is really simple.  Simpler than what most people think.  You will need to build a wooden frame to go around the spare tire well.  This serves two purposes:

• Gives you a place to mount the sub-woofer too.  You build a "cap" that will get screwed into the wooden frame.  The cap will have a hole where the sub-woofer is mounted to.  I like to use MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) rather than regular particle board or plywood.  But that's a personal preference and the drawbacks are price, weight (heavier) and is much harder to work (harder to cut).  However, they are stronger and the surface can be painted with little to no prep-work.  Particle board tends to absorb the paint and I've seen some where it soaked up too much paint and later crumbled.
• Gives the fiberglass cloth something to bond too.

The "cap" I built pretty much filled the entire rear section because I was also adding my CD changer and cross over (at that time ~ I went all Alpine a couple of years ago which replaced the Sony cross over with an Alpine GS-200 Signal Proccessor which I have mounted under the passenger).  Basically it became a new floor.  I carpeted it and could have left it "as-is" but I decided to build a "beauty board" which has the raised CRX lettering and gives the components a more "sunk-in" look.  I also have another floor that replaces the beauty board that covers/protects the sub-woofer and components.  This is used when I need to use the rear area to haul/store stuff.

I don't have any more pictures other than what's on the web site.  I wasn't going to photo-document it to begin with.  I was just going to do a "before" and "after" sort of picture.

You also don't have to use fiberglass.  I've seen people actually build a small box and stuck it in the spare tire well.  You give up some of the air space but it works.  If you want to get some additional ideas, check out my friend's CRX, Mike Munsell at http://www.mrmunsell.com/

If you email him, be sure to let him know that I referred you or else he may not send a reply.  :^)

Whatever you do/decide, please let me know as I always love checking out other people's custom work...

Robert K. Kuhn
CRX Owners Group President (http://www.crx.org/southcal)

1990 Honda CRXsi (http://drive.to/jiggy)
ICQ # 3714283 (nickname: godzilla)