Fiberglass speaker box building hardware

The techniques outlined in this step by step is my own personal techniques and experiences so please feel free to modify the way it is done here. We start out with a clean trunk and an idea of what we want to do with the enclosure and the equipment that we're installing into the trunk. The next step is to draw out the base of the enclosure and use poster board paper cut into strips to contour the edges of the base. This will ensure a tight and accurate shape around the trunk edge. Next step is to mask the sides of the trunk to avoid fiberglass from sticking to areas that you don't want it to.

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Content:

• Looking for tips. Fiberglass box building
• More Developments in Loudspeaker Enclosure Materials
• DIY Audio & Video
• 10 JL Audio W3 Fiberglass Speaker SUBWOOFER Rings 3/4 MDF SUBWOOFER Box Ring
• Need help building marine speaker boxes??
• DIY PICS : ANHC Fiberglass Subwoofer Box
• Fiberglass Speaker Box Enclosure
• How much does it cost to fiberglass a sub box?
• In-Wall Subwoofer Enclosures
• MDF VS Fibre Glass, Which is the best for a Subwoofer Enclosure Box? Building Tips

WATCH RELATED VIDEO: How many layers of fiberglass are needed for a subwoofer box? – Fabrication Friday

Looking for tips. Fiberglass box building

Fiberglass subwoofer enclosures present some real advantages for a custom car audio setup. First, they can be shaped to fit a specific vehicle or space within a vehicle, taking advantage of space that couldn't be used with a normal rectangular subwoofer enclosure.

Second, if properly executed, they can present a real custom look that will make your car audio system truly "one of a kind. Although this tutorial is made to go into your wheel well areas, you could use this tutorial for anything, kick panels, racks, and other speaker boxes.

If you have some knowledge of working with glass, then this should be a walk in the park. Expect at least 8 hours of working on the first day to get your car in order, and get a good pull of your trunk space. In the end you should have a show winning sound set up that will look as good as it will sound. You are now going to need to remove as much as you can from the trunk, everything you may have in there that will get in the way should be removed, even the trunk lid if it gets in your way.

The carpet should remain, and you will need to get it as smooth and as perfect to the contours of your car as possible. Use a Vacuum to suck up any debris and dirt that will be in your trunk, you don't want to be dirtying up your box. Using a good quality masking tape, the blue painters tape works best, start creating a layer of tape in the area that you will be glassing.

I recommend that you do 2 layers, and crisscross them to ensure you don't get resin seeping through. Resin will not come off of metal, clothes, carpet, or your dog, so be careful.

Extend the tape layer a few inches past where your box will go, and also glass out a few inches past that but within the tapes area. I have seen some tutorials do this, and some not, it is really up to you. Use squares of the foil, taping and overlapping them as you go. You should now be ready to start the glassing.

Protecting the interior is very important as this stuff will not come off. I suggest placing newspaper, or drop plastic all around your work area. Also, if you like you can also put a sheet of plastic between your trunk and cabin to prevent fumes from getting in and stinking up the car for a few days.

This is where all the fun and time goes into this project, it will take forever, but you need to take your time. NOTE: It is very important you wear a face mask, and a good quality expensive one, not the disposable kind, the resin, and fiberglass fumes will get in your lungs and cause problems for you breathing. Get a good quality one from Home Depot, and work in a well ventilated area. Prepare your resin by mixing the recommended amount of hardener and resin as listed on the package.

You will not want to work with large amount, or change the amount of hardener you can vary it depending on temperature. I recommend that you use no more than 2 - 4oz at a time. I suggest mixing a batch in plastic cups and working in small areas.

You should get about 30 minutes of work time, and good area coverage with the right amount of hardener, and resin. Once you have prepared your resin, you will need to prepare the fiberglass. This isn't that hard, just rip up the matte into manageable strips, about 1" x 4" long. Wear your mask! Now you can finally begin. The procedure I used is quite like paper mache if you have ever done that.

Take your cheapo brush, and dip it in resin, spreading it over the area your are going to be working on. Then take one of your glass strips and place it on there. Then use your brush again to dab resin onto the strip until it turns more transparent. Look out for bubbles, if you see white areas bubbling up you have air trapped.

Use your brush and try to spread out the air to get rid of it. Air bubbles could make your box boom itself to pieces if its too weak. Continue laying fiberglass in this fashion, crossing over the other pieces until you have a good layer that covers the taped area. Remeber to make your shell bigger than you actually want, you will trim it down later. Wait about 2 hours until it has dried and become touchable. You can use a hair dryer to help speed up the process!

You will want to add a few more layers of fiberglass now using the same technique in the previous steps. After a few layers it may be strong enough to remove from the vehicle, it is much easier to do the work outside of the car!

You could have problems keeping the contours of the trunk in your box if it is not strong enough, so make sure it is strong once you remove it.. You will need to add about more is better layers total of glass on the inside, so whether you want to do it inside the trunk or remove the box and do it outside is up to you.

When you do remove your box from the car it is now a good time to also remove all the tape from the box, and inside of the car. Its ok if some of it sticks to the box, you won't notice it. You should now be doing all your glassing outside of the car. Just make sure everything is dried before you place it back in the car.

After your 5 or more layers of fiberglass have been laid you should not have the cleanest edge on the out side of the box. Hopefully you added more than you wanted because you will need to trim off the excess anyway's to get a good thickness. Place your box in your trunk it should be snug and draw a line where you want the edge to be.

Then using a dremel, rotozip, jig saw or other cutting device work your way along that line. You should then have a nice edge all the way around, with the same thickness throughout. On my vehicle there is an moving part of the trunk that would come in contact with the box when you close the trunk.

It is very important that you note and obstructions and create a clearance in your box. Now is a good time to do it, before you begin to install your speaker rings. Create a necessary jig out of MDF to create a pocket in your box. Then use wooden dowels and hot melt glue to secure the piece in place where it encounters the obstruction. Once it is in place you can fleece and fiberglass the area around it step 10 , or wait until your speaker rings are also in place.

It is up to you what you do, but I recommend working on the obstruction area first because it will be easier to lay fiberglass on the inside. Your subs should come with some kind of diagram on the sizes, cut as to their specifications. If you would like the added look you can make a second ring to countersink your sub in the box more. Just secure the 2 rings together, and go with that, it will look very good. If you are using carpet, and counter sinking, it is important to make your ring bigger than normal so you can put carpet underneath the subwoofer.

You may choose to paint your rings black if they are visible. Additional information about speaker rings can get found elsewhere on the net. You should now take into consideration how much volume you will have in the speaker box itself. If you are just now figuring this out, then you may have problems with having too little space for the desired sub you are using, which could be very bad.

A method that has been proven to be an easy and cheap way for finding volume is to use packing peanuts. Take your subs desired volume and fill up your box with that around of packing peanuts, hopefully you took the volume and wheel well volume size into consideration before you started. Take your speaker ring, and place that where the packing peanuts stop, you will want to be a little bit further out than that due to your subs coil taking up space. Remember, its better to have your box built with too much room rather than not enough.

Hover your speaker ring in that area, and remember about where it was. You can now decide if you want to angle it towards anything as well, the front of the car, and other side of the trunk, or upwards. This is now a rather tricky part you will need to take your hot melt glue gun, and dowel rods and some how make your speaker ring float in the area where you want it to be.

There are other methods with using plumbers metal positioning wire to hold it up, but I feel that's just more work. Make sure the ring is firmly in place, you don't want it to come undone or collapse. Using some hot melt glue attach the fleece to the top of the fiberglassed area. You will need to then stretch the fabric over the MDF to the other side of the fiberglassed part, securing with more hot melt. You should now have a fabric covering everything that is not covered in fiberglass.

Make sure you get every single wrinkle you have out of the fabric, it is very important, make tiny cuts if you have to, but hopefully it will stretch around everything cleanly. Using the good mixture and the resin and hardener as mention in step 4 , take your cheapo paint brushes and start painting the fleece with resin. Cover the whole area, except where your sub will go, that isn't necessary to do. Saturate the fleece with the resin until it becomes soaked through pretty well, it will need to dry, but once it does it should be pretty solid.

You are now on the last leg of your fiberglassing work. Add layers of fiberglass to the fleeced area following the steps as seen in step 4. Make sure you don't add glass to the area where the subs go, those will be cut out later. You can now cut open the sub hole and trim the fleece. You should use a dremel tool or similar to open up the area and trim it as close to the MDF speaker rings and possible.

You can also remove a bit of material from the back now, if there still is some. If you are noticing any spots on your box where there may be some weakness, due to air pockets, or thinness. Now would be a good time to add another layer of fiberglass.

Try to do it on the inside of the box to keep the outside nice. There are several different ways to wire your subs, no I'm not going to talk about series or parallel, or ohms, information on how they should be wired can be found here. The main problem you will face is how to get power to the subs once they're in a sealed box. Most pre made boxes have a connected you simply connect your wires to.

More Developments in Loudspeaker Enclosure Materials

Last Updated: December 17, To create this article, volunteer authors worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 43, times. Learn more If you're looking for a slick way to install a car speaker or subwoofer in an oddly-shaped space, you can create a custom fiberglass enclosure that fits around the wheel wells in your trunk. We'll walk you through casting a fiberglass mold of your trunk and using it to create a DIY speaker box. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers.

DIY Audio & Video

One of the most frequent questions I receive by email and that I see on the car audio forums has to do with fiberglass thickness. Specifically the thickness of a fiberglass subwoofer enclosure. There's a lot of confusion over how thick or how many layers of fiberglass should be used to create a car audio subwoofer box. The purpose of this article is to clear up some of the confusion. There is a lot of debate in fiberglassing over the thickness needed. You really have to be careful who you listen to. I've basically heard everything up to about one inch of thickness. It's usually from newbies who are just guessing based on what they know about MDF thickness for enclosures.

10 JL Audio W3 Fiberglass Speaker SUBWOOFER Rings 3/4 MDF SUBWOOFER Box Ring

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Need help building marine speaker boxes??

Remember Me? Ben where he posted a picture of a custom fiberglass enclosure he built to house his 10" JL Audio W6 subwoofer see Post 7. The idea of attempting to build such an enclosure had crossed my mind a few times, but after reading some "DIY's" on it, I decided that it'd consume more of my time than I was willing to give up. Once I saw that we had a local expert capable of building such enclosures, naturally, I made contact. I sent him the details for my sub from the JL Audio website as well as their recommended sealed enclosure specifications.

DIY PICS : ANHC Fiberglass Subwoofer Box

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Fiberglass Speaker Box Enclosure

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How much does it cost to fiberglass a sub box?

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In-Wall Subwoofer Enclosures

The Audio Voice Newsletter. Show more Show less. In this report, Klasco once again shares his knowledge with loudspeaker enclosures and reports on the progress in enclosure materials and technologies in This article was originally published in Voice Coil, March

MDF VS Fibre Glass, Which is the best for a Subwoofer Enclosure Box? Building Tips

There are times when I feel the need to really make a mess. When I think of making messes with a degree of permanency, I think of fiberglass. I also really like the smell, reminds me of a simpler time in 8 th grade shop class. But the whole process, including the mess, is worth it for the amazing shapes you can produce for speaker pods and custom enclosures.