My vert LukeBox install

[Cha Ching]

Have you taken off the board yet?

Oh yeah, I have to dig up a photo of it, that's all. He was definitely on the right track, but compared to what Luke (aka 'stereoinstaller') has accomplished with his 'vert box, it looks comical, at best.

There were tons of drywall screws used to hold the board in place and the subwoofer surrounds had worn away from rubbing against the back seat (where he also removed copious amounts of seat foam). But it must have worked, as the owner kept asking me if, "...I had a chance to listen to that killer sound system yet?". Since it was pretty much fubar'd from when I bought it, I thought they were kidding me....

[treff-7]

Wow! That's something again! He was up to something but the execution was terrible...
Nice interior BTW!

Have you taken off the board yet?

[Cha Ching]

This is what the previous owner did to an otherwise very nice, OEM M-Tech II. Based on what stereoinstaller has accomplished with his vert box, this guy was on target. He basically cut 2 holes for his subwoofers into the rear seat panel and than used the enclosure as his own bandpass enclosure. Note the Home Depot expanding insulation and Michael's Arts 'n Crafts store polyfill/cotton ball material used for sealing purposes. He then used a thin sheet of fiberboard and duct-taped it to form a seal.

I'm still cleaning out all the crap he did. Good idea (a la Luke), but crap execution.

[treff-7]

I paid $12+3x$2 admission. And I bought a battery operated saw but I returned it because it broke at the very end.
What part of LA are at? There's a guy in the valley who's parting out a convertible at a shop. I'm sure he would let you use his outlet so you don't need to dick around with batteries and all that crap.

[Cha Ching]

I need to do the exact same thing for my 'vert! I thought I was the only muh-rooon running around with a hacked up 'vert. What did the patch panel from the yard set you back?

[treff-7]

I took last Friday off and worked on the car. I didn't get as much done as I wanted to but I'm happy about the fact that I was able to cross off another thing from my list of todo's.

Here's the trimmed and cleaned piece ready to go in:


And The Hole (sorry for the cellphone pic but I had nothing else handy):

Griding this was stupid loud! My ears were ringing all day.

Test fit - like a glove:


Here it is welded in. I was using a PITA $100 flux welder so it isn't as nice looking as it could be but it holds.


A little grinding where I needed to fill up a 1/4" gap. It was a bit on the ugly side...


And a dash of primer after cleaning to prevent the unwanted rustic look. I will spray it white later to make it look like I wanna make it nice. :)


There was another thing I worked on but it's off topic in this section. I will still write about it though because mostly vert owners read this and it's vert specific.

So the short B pillar on the driver always felt a bit loose on my car so now I decided to take a look at it. Turns out the rear quarter panel has been replaced but the spot welds broke and it didn't support the pillar anymore. I went ahead and put a few 2-inch-long welds on the edge all the way down to the bottom corner of the panel. Now my car isn't as loud as it was before and not because I have the panel welded in. Certain noises disappeared. I guess as the body was moving the sheets on the pillar were sliding on each other and the spot welds were making some noise. Also the car feels noticeably stiffer. On my way to work there is a small ramp I need to drive up on kinda sideways and it twists the chassis. My door seals were always squeaking but now there is nothing whatsoever! I don't know if it's due to the panel I welded in or the rear quarter panel/B pillar fix but it definitely helped! Also the pillar is rock solid now.
End of off-topic crap.

[treff-7]

It took me a few weeks to find one and 3 days to cut it out. I kept running out of batteries. And I broke the saw as well at the last cut. 2 days later I saw a local guy here parting out a convertible...

[Justin B]

Right on. Glad you found a usable piece to patch up that gaping hole!

[treff-7]

I don't have much time to work on it unfortunately. I'm gonna take Friday off from work and try to install it at least physically and I can do the wiring later little by little.
I've got an arc audio ks 300.2. That will make this puppy dance! :D

[MoreMayhem]

Looks like it is coming along nicely!

What amp did you go with?

[treff-7]

I thought about it but I already ran the power cable for it. I might gonna do it at some point though. I could use some weight on the right rear corner of my car. I got rid of the vibration damper and have an e36 m3 muffler which is quite heavy.

[Cabriolet]

while you are there, you might want to do a battery in the truck conversion. makes it a lot easier to get power back there.

[treff-7]

Here come the promised pics:

The donor I found. The color could not be any more different from mine but I'm glad I managed to find one.


Originally I wanted to pull the whole panel but after taking a good look at it I realized that there are about 150 spot welds on this thing plus it supports the top mount of the rear seat belts which I really didn't want to mess with so I decided to cut out the missing part only.


Holes cut for the tubes.


I trimmed the piece to match the hole on my car so it's ready for welding.

After this I wanted to get rid of the trunk tar when another surprise came: No trunk tar!!! I don't know if some of these cars came without it or the PO got rid of it but it's one less headache for me! :D


I pulled out the front cover from the trunk and test fitted the box. It wouldn't slide all the way to the wall. After a short investigation I found out that the front ends of the side covers are bent in and they won't let the box slide all the way forward. You can see in this picture that the end doesn't reach the wall. Also the harness was in the way so I untied it and removed the tie down. You can see the hole by the harness where it used to be.


In order to be able to push the box all the way forward I cut these corners on the covers so they can open up. I cut the bottom and top corners as well. This way the box was able to slide all the way to the wall.



I looked around in there to see if I will be able to secure the box in place somehow or some bars need to be welded in that I can screw it to but the box is actually a couple inches taller than the hole itself so it won't be an issue. There is enough metal on top to drive some screws through. However the foam that Luke put on the box that's supposed to seal the box to the wall might not be enough because there isn't much wall left so I will install some self sticking foam strip around the cut out to create a better seal.

Here's the compartment before I touched it. All that rusty crap is metal shaving. Whoever cut that hole didn't take the time to clean it out and it just rusted and stuck in there.


And after a good scrub:


With the wall cut out I was able to stick my head in there and take a good look around. There are a bunch of holes in there! This picture only shows the big ones:


I was going to use the dynamat door kit which is more thin than the regular sheet (as far as I know). Because of it isn't that thick I wanted to use 2 layers over the holes to make it more rigid so I sealed all of them first.


And this is how far I got as of now. The next step will be to weld in the missing piece.

[treff-7]

So I had some time to work on this. Managed to find a convertible and cut out the piece that was missing from mine. I have pictures that i will upload soon.

I have a question though! The wall that separates the trunk and this compartment is also missing which means that if i install the lukebox that will close the hole and the sound waves will hit the front of it which is covered with foam. Will that change the way it will sound???

[Cabriolet]

How does it sound BTW?

Can you access the spare wheel?

sounds great, and i really really doubt i can get to my spare w/o removing it's tiedown