I wasn't happy with the door locations in the coupe so I wanted to try playing with kickpanel enclosures like I had in my last system (4Runner). Decided to give it a shot myself, haven't played with fiberglass in 10+ years so you'll excuse the sloppy work, but you'll get the idea (I hope).

I should also say, I'm claiming extra cool points for ghettoness and creativity on this one.

So, conventional wisdom says when you're doing kickpanels you start with the factory panel, build a mold up (using clay, bondo, any number of other substances) and lay fiberglass on top. That works, but I didn't want to permanently ruin my factory panels. I'm 99% sure this car will be run into the ground and then rebuilt as a weekend track car, never to be resold, but I still hate permanently changing anything I can't change back (without buying replacement parts).

Not wanting to destroy the factory panel right off the bat, I wrapped it in heavy duty aluminum foil and used some painters tape to keep it all together and somewhat tight, this shows up in pics later but I don't have a picture of just this.

So I decided to take the mold in a different direction, I cut apart a box that I wasn't using. I cut a round piece in the dimensions of the trim ring for the mid and then a 3" wide by ... I dunno 6" long piece. These two pieces of cardboard worked out by having the long piece folded over into a 3" tall squarish contraption with the round piece resting on top of it (because my mids have a slightly less than 3" mounting depth). I then cut a 3" section of paper-towel roll for the tweeter and taped them together. Once it was all taped together, I taped it to my foil covered factory panel and laid aluminum foil over it too. It looks something like this:



In the next pic you can see that the foil didn't make it's own sealed area, but it's OK because the fiberglass mat will drape over everything as I'll show later.



So with my "template" all set and ready to go, I mixed up enough resin and hardener for 1 sheet of fiberglass mat that I cut just large enough to cover the whole area and then some. Once it was laid over and ready to cure it looked like this:





Once it all dried (was good in about 2 hours but I left it alone over night because I got distracted) I went back to pull the original panel and my "template" out. The aluminum foil, because it was not evenly laid down did stick in parts, but not badly. For the most part it came away very easily.

Here I've removed the factory panel and you can see my cardboard awesomeness:



Again, just backed up. Factory panel on the right, still wrapped in foil, the mdf ring/duct tape/cd case was used as a stand so I had a semi-level work area



Here I've removed the cardboard mold (center) and you can see that the foil I used to cover it is still hanging out with the fiberglass



And last, here's the foil pulled/scraped off the mold and what I have left to work with



This is really only the first step, there's quite a bit more to go, but the rest, imo, is the easy stuff. Now that I have an exterior shell to deal with, I can lay in an MDF trim ring for the mid and fiber glass that into place while I'm laying more sheets (and eventually a back) inside for strength. My panel will be carpeted so I'm not at all concerned with it being ugly as long as it's strong and sounds good. I'll spend some more time on it this week and update as I go, but I was pretty happy with how the first step came out. Fiberglass is not scary at all, and I'm digging it. Lemme know what yall think.

 

Pics of the OEM panel fitment, trim ring fitment, and trim ring being glassed into the whole pod. By trim ring in this case I mean the MDF ring the speaker will mount to as opposed to the little plastic piece that holds the speaker grill in place.

Here's the inside view of the OEM panel inside the fiberglass, testing for fitment and pleasantly surprised



Outside view of the same thing, just flipped it over



It took some flexing of the fiberglass to make the panel fit inside, which I take as a good thing. When I trim off the excess I expect it to form fit and then mold in pretty well.

Here's the trim ring laid in so I can mark off what to cut later



And here's the same trim ring fiberglassed in. I soaked both sides of the MDF in resin/hardener before placing it down so it would stick to the existing mold and new mat would stick to it, then added 4 sheets of 2" wide by roughly 7-8" long mat around the outside to tuck in around the MDF and hold it to the rest of the pod. It's currently drying but I used WAY more hardener than I should of so we'll probably know in the next hour if I was good or not. Anyway, here's the current status of the kick panel:



More to come, as always I do welcome comments, criticism, feedback, praise, beer & *******, whatever ya think ya want to leave.

After looking at it, it's kind of hard to see just what is happening because of the downward view and aluminum foil backdrop, I'll try and get some better pics once it dries.

Already dry enough to flip over, I did mention I used way too much hardener on this batch right?

 

^ + 1

 

Updated with some pics, will knock out the passenger side tomorrow and add carpet on Sunday morning if all goes well. Hoping to be able to listen to music again Sunday night/Monday morning.

 

I hope you plan on adding more glass to those and make the mold more rigid. Those things are going to resonate so bad if you don't. You need to make them at least 1/8" thick. You need many more layers of mat and I would suggest a milkshake mixture for further rigidity on the inside. I'm just trying to help out so please don't talk the comments wrong.

 

agreed

 

Won't argue with you a bit. The thinnest sections (at the bottom) are staying thin for now because they'll be trimmed off to fit the factory panel and at the moment I've got about 6 overlapping sections at it's thinnest point (of what will be the final portion of the new panel). I was worried about resonance too and will continue to be until they're done, this is just a way to document the process, 1/8" would probably be good but I think I'd actually like to go thicker and then stuff them with some polyfill to knock down any extra noise issues inside. Good feedback and something to keep in mind for anyone doing similar work though.

So far though the panel is very stiff, but it doesn't yet have the weight that I'd like for acoustics. Another day or two and I should be able to fix that, we shall see

And to edit: I'm comparing these to the prefab Q-form panels I had in my 4Runner, I was very happy with the way they performed for being something off the shelf, but I definitely do want these to be a lot more solid than those plastic panels were. Looking back on it now, they were a bit thin and definitely didn't enhance the speakers that were in them in any way.

Again, thanks for the feedback, will update later this weekend as time allows.

 

nice i used to have a 4runner and had kickpanels in it. great audio build what speakers are you using?

 

Old set of Focal Utopias (like later 90s/early 2000s old), 5w2 mid and tn51 tweeter.

 

Well, a month and half later and I'm actually back to working on the kickpanels. Stupid back problems and Army doctors

Driver side is kick about 80% done, I need to start cutting out a bit of material to run the tweeter off-axis and then mold it to the factory panel, deaden and carpet it.

Passenger side kickpanel is now actually in existence. I've got an outer shell and will spend a few days reinforcing it. Sorry for the lack of delays, got distracted with a couple other projects and had a few weeks there where I couldn't do much of anything. Will try to get some more pics up tomorrow and solicit feedback on thickness from the experts.

 

not sure why, but I can't view your pics. Regardless, I started on the same project myself this summer. Been working on the kickpanels little by little since August. I share your thoughts on not wanting to modify the factory panels, so I made mine from scratch with some fiberglass resin and mat. I didn't realize there was someone out there as crazy as me.