custom speaker grills
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From: in a van down by the river....
custom speaker grills
four score and 7 years later I've finally managed to just about finish up the install after gettin' my butt in gear this week. i've got one really ugly problem to deal with though and the 2 ideas I had for speaker grills that would be replacing the stock ones haven't been too successful.
1998 nissan frontier - set of Alpine Type R 6 3/4" components in stock locs. below are some pics. The reason I didn't want to retain stock was I wanted to have something a bit more acoustically transparent than the thick plastic stock grills. If someone were to take those factory grilles and compress them to the point none of the small grill holes existed, it wouldn't surprise me that the compacted piece of plastic could cover up 1/2 the speaker - which is why I hated the thought of retaining factory grilles when I knew a large portion of mid-bass up to mid-range notes would be firing into 1/8"plastic grill.
My original idea was the following along with the added step of wrapping some gray cloth around my chicken-wire grill frame. classy, huh. anyway, this of course ended up not working at all because I couldn't get the cloth to tightly wrap around the grill frame AND not interfere with bonding the grill frame to the inside of the door panel itself.
here is what happened to the passenger side....after the epoxy cured and I tried to find out how well it bonded to plastic....not at all. little bit of force applied to outside of grill and the entire thing popped out which is why passenger door currently looks like this.
After this idea I thought I should see if I could find some wood that was cut thin enough to make an oval to which I could attach speaker cloth and then somehow affix this to the opening you see in above picture. Found the wood and made the oval but there just wasn't any solid way to mount this grill to the opening I cut out.
At this point I'm not sure what other options I should consider that will actually be functional (all I want to prevent is a small kick from a shoe or small box/package/etc from damaging the speaker) while also looking fairly professional.
Any other ideas from you guys that might be do-able? I'll note I'm a novice at fit & finish - in hindsight it was not a good idea to convince myself I could pull this off but oh well
Modified by thekid03 at 7:46 PM 7/17/2008
1998 nissan frontier - set of Alpine Type R 6 3/4" components in stock locs. below are some pics. The reason I didn't want to retain stock was I wanted to have something a bit more acoustically transparent than the thick plastic stock grills. If someone were to take those factory grilles and compress them to the point none of the small grill holes existed, it wouldn't surprise me that the compacted piece of plastic could cover up 1/2 the speaker - which is why I hated the thought of retaining factory grilles when I knew a large portion of mid-bass up to mid-range notes would be firing into 1/8"plastic grill.
My original idea was the following along with the added step of wrapping some gray cloth around my chicken-wire grill frame. classy, huh. anyway, this of course ended up not working at all because I couldn't get the cloth to tightly wrap around the grill frame AND not interfere with bonding the grill frame to the inside of the door panel itself.
here is what happened to the passenger side....after the epoxy cured and I tried to find out how well it bonded to plastic....not at all. little bit of force applied to outside of grill and the entire thing popped out which is why passenger door currently looks like this.
After this idea I thought I should see if I could find some wood that was cut thin enough to make an oval to which I could attach speaker cloth and then somehow affix this to the opening you see in above picture. Found the wood and made the oval but there just wasn't any solid way to mount this grill to the opening I cut out.
At this point I'm not sure what other options I should consider that will actually be functional (all I want to prevent is a small kick from a shoe or small box/package/etc from damaging the speaker) while also looking fairly professional.
Any other ideas from you guys that might be do-able? I'll note I'm a novice at fit & finish - in hindsight it was not a good idea to convince myself I could pull this off but oh well
Modified by thekid03 at 7:46 PM 7/17/2008
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