This project could take some time... (image heavy)

[chrisgettings]

paul are you going to 888 if you are ill show you there

and ill bring a drill to

bring the speaker wire to

[craigmerry]

Don't just give your old standard head unit away, stuck mine on ebay and it sold for £70 within a day , i was amazed.

[ion]

Very interesting mate!

[Ian-Highlander]

Typically, got up this morning and it's chucking it down with rain and the weather forecast is for more of the same all day getting worse.

Ach well, late breakfast, watch the Grand Prix qualifying and then see if it HAS improved or not. If not I guess the door speakers get postponed to tomorrow (weather allowing).

[dv8]

ear defenders at the ready!

[Ian-Highlander]

Don't just give your old standard head unit away, stuck mine on ebay and it sold for £70 within a day , i was amazed.

Heh, it went on Ebay this morning along with all the other bits I listed earlier in the week that I've ripped off the car.

[Ian-Highlander]

Right, got a couple of hours between the rain so dashed outside and got a little bit more done. Have rushed this bit a little and will have to go back and re-visit it more thoroughly when I have more time/better weather. Regretfully, my rushing has also turned out to be quite costly as a silly error on my part sees me needing to replace the door loom end plug on the car side (explanation further down).

Anyway... First things first, I checked the wiring loom connectors between the doors, my plan always being to simply drill through some spare holes and run the new cables through those just as I've done a million other times on other cars, yes it makes it awkward if you ever need to disconnect them again, but as long as you leave some slack behind the kick panel there's no issue. This was my first time looking at a veccy C door loom and the connector is somewhat different to others I've seen before, but once I'd worked out the unlocking mechanism for it, pulled the clip up and the plug smoothly came away. Great I thought, I checked the plug and sure enough there are several spare holes that with a slight enlargement will do the job just nicely. So, letting go of the connector again, I headed indoors to get the drill out. Unfortunately, my brain went into automatic pilot and I slammed the car door shut as I walked past not wanting to leave the car open on the drive... You can guess what's coming next, I heard this god almighty crunch and the sound of splintering plastic, yup you guessed it, muggins here hadn't re-connected the loom before shutting the door and the connector plug had smashed into smithereens. Luckily the central core of the connector is still intact so it will still connect fine and as soon as I get time to get down the dealer or a scrappy I'll replace it.



Don't think superglue's going to fix this one somehow...



Anyway after much swearing, shouting, paddying and crying (ok crying is an exaggeration but I felt like it), I put that "issue" to one side and carried on with my "mission".

I removed the Tweeter housing assembly and insulation from the door panel and put it to one side for later.



I started to strip down the passenger side door panel, removed the three screws at the bottom, took the door handle cover off and removed the two inside there as well and gently started to pop the panel off, removing wiring connections to switches and the door handle opening rod as I went and with a bit of brute force (the window strip clips where some what tight), removed the door panel.



At this point I began to realise I wasn't the first to have done this, here was my first hint that perhaps someone had been here before...



Combine that with the fact the damp proofing layer was just hanging off and was slightly ripped and the fact that several of the plastic clips where broken and need replacing and I think my suspicions are pretty well founded



Turning my attention back to the wiring loom side of things I removed the door side plug from the door to allow me to get a better view of it. For anyone who's not sure how to do this, the orange clip shown on the left of this picture clicks upwards unlocking the two side push in clips which then allows you to drop the plug into the door and retrieve it through the door for closer work.



Here's that orange clip seen after the plug has been removed from the door fixing.



A quick look inside reveals loads of un-used connection points.



Previously I've been known to obtain spare pins and solder wires into these and connect them up, however a much quicker (and lazier) way is just to dril through the holes very carefully making them wide enough to take the cables. We'll come to that bit in a minute, first we need to know where we're going to be running the cables to.

Next I fitted the speaker adaptor plate (remembering to line the part that touches the door with some double sided padded tape shaped to fit which takes up the gaps and stops vibrations, trim off the excess neatly with a very sharp knife).

Next was where to mount the crossovers in the doors, despite being big doors the veccy c's don't have a huge amount of space spare in them. I decided to mount them inside the door where I'm holding them up to mark the drilling points in this picture. This is a convenient place, it's well clear of any window mechanisms and also slap bang in between the woofer and tweeter and right near the main cable exit point, allowing you to run the cables behind the window guide and out the connector.



Having drilled the mounting holes (and making a bit of a hash of the right hand hole thanks to a drill bit that bent (never seen a drill bit "bend" before, plenty snap, but not bend, that'll teach me to use cheap bits I guess ), I ran the cables and cut them to approximately correct lengths. The speaker cable I'm using is Alpine's own high grade oxygen free blah blah blah that's specifically designed for use on high power DD-Drive components.



For the tweeter cables Vauxhall very considerately fit a double skin at the tops of the doors at that point which reaches right down to where I'm mounting my crossovers, a nice protected cable run specially made for the job already there and meaning the cable doesn't get caught on anything over time, that's nice of them



Now the scary bit, very VERY carefully drill out two of the spare holes, if you decide to do this make sure you keep the drill perfectly straight all the way through, here's the two internal ones I did (far left top and bottom holes).



Do the same for the car side of the loom plug and then from the car side feed the cable through both parts of the plug (having split the cable for exactly the right length so that the two cables go through seperately but only for just the right amount to get to the crossover. Car side the cable is still joined as a standard twin cable.



At this point I was so engrossed with what I was doing, I completely forgot to take pictures, sorry. Anyway, the crossover was mounted inside the door panel with screws going through from the outside through the previously drilled holes and into the mounting screw holes in the crossovers ensuring a solid mounting for those. The new speaker was mounted into the adaptor plate and connected up and the door panel put back on.



At this point it starting hacking it down with rain again, so a very quick tidy up and chuck everything either in the car or indoors and I belted inside. I've brought the tweeter bits inside and am going to fit the tweeter into the housing shortly ready to fit back onto the car tomorrow.

Tomorrow... get the wiring through the inside grommet past the relay/fuse box behind the glove box and then temporarily hook it up directly to the headunit for now and get the drivers side done as well (as long as the weather holds out).

More to follow soon.

[Ian-Highlander]

Well that went better (and quicker) than I thought it would.

Tweeter assembly minus one tweeter clip that I've cut off as the new mount is too big for all three.



Here's the Alpine parts I'll be using, from left to right, tweeter, mounting plate/screw/speed clip and Alpine tweeter surface mount adaptor.



The surface mounting plate is actually designed to allow mouting on the surface of the tweeter by cutting a hole, sinking the mount in and fixing the tweeter into it. I considered doing this with this, it would have shown the nice Alpine tweeter off nicely, but I want this car to basically look as near to standard as possible from inside, so I used the mount slightly differently as it was very close to the size I needed to mount it the other way. So using the screw and the speed clip, I fixed the mounting plate into the surface mount fixing.





The tweeter then twists and clips onto the metal mounting plate inside the surface mount.



I then measured and roughly cut two slots in the mount that lined up with the clips I left in the original tweeter mounting position.



A little fine tuning, neaten up the cuts and we're left with this.



Finally replace the sound insulation and the tweeter is ready to be fitted in the morning.

[Preey]

Looking good keep it up & one day soon you will be done lol

[corman]

great write up, looking forward to the rest of the install