martian's 2001 buick build log

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

working on tweeter pods for the front stage:

oh yeah, you ever try to fiberglass when it's cold? And I mean cold?

it friggin *****. Anyways, spent some time working on wiring under the rear seat as well

(fyi, the red 8-gauge wire is a direct run to the HU)

you like my ghetto "distribution" ? lol.

moved some stuff around, everything is finalized:

and as of tonite my car is finally a 6-passenger car again //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif It's probably been 6 months since I could say that so i'm quite happy.

Still to do:

-finish tweeter pods

-deaden and soundproof rear doors

-wire in 2 more amps and alpine sound processor

-build active x-overs for the rear speakers

-clean up some wiring in the trunk

that's probably as far as i'm gonna go with this for now, i'm not gonna bother making the trunk look nice because i'm going to have to rip everything back there out over the summer anyways in order to access my rear strut towers //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/frown.gif.a3531fa0534503350665a1e957861287.gif

 

[rodburner 10+ year member]

Looking great as usual. I do quite a bit of "glassing" in the winter. I have an old "truck box",[ you know,the diamond plate aluminum things] set up in my shed,with a small electric heater inside.It will cure a piece in an hour on a 20F day,even if I don't mix the hardener "hot". Keeps the FG smell outside too. A poor man's E Z bake oven..

 

[SomeguyinPDX 10+ year member]

Just read your thread from begining to end. Top notch build quality! Its nice to see a build where every issue was handled the right way (usually the hard way) not cutting corners just because its easyier or faster. Looking forward to seeing how your sails turn out, I'm getting ready to start mine shortly and will be doing something very simular. Great Job!

 

[SomeguyinPDX 10+ year member]

One concern on your sub box. I couldnt tell in the pics, but can you still get at the rear strut tower bolts? or are they in the rear deck of the cabin? Years ago I burried by bolts behind a big box without thinking bout it till it became an issue. Your box is way, way to nice to have to cut into.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Looking great as usual. I do quite a bit of "glassing" in the winter. I have an old "truck box",[ you know,the diamond plate aluminum things] set up in my shed,with a small electric heater inside.It will cure a piece in an hour on a 20F day,even if I don't mix the hardener "hot". Keeps the FG smell outside too. A poor man's E Z bake oven..

that's not a bad idea....i normally just add a lot of extra hardener and it usually cures in about 10 minutes or so with the heat gun but I still gotta freeze my nuts off for 10 minutes lol

Just read your thread from begining to end. Top notch build quality! Its nice to see a build where every issue was handled the right way (usually the hard way) not cutting corners just because its easyier or faster. Looking forward to seeing how your sails turn out, I'm getting ready to start mine shortly and will be doing something very simular. Great Job!
One concern on your sub box. I couldnt tell in the pics, but can you still get at the rear strut tower bolts? or are they in the rear deck of the cabin? Years ago I burried by bolts behind a big box without thinking bout it till it became an issue. Your box is way, way to nice to have to cut into.

Thanks for the compliments!! I started this build in like mid july of 2011 so its been a long time and a lot of work as you can see. And yes, unfortunately I completely blocked the rear strut towers and will need to take off the back of the box to access them. The good news is that I think I will actually be able to do this without too much hassle, and then I can just cut new pieces for the back and be done with it //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[Fi_ 10+ year member]

Good build man I have newfound respect for you! can't wait to see more videos...

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

Good build man I have newfound respect for you! can't wait to see more videos...

thanks. I'm doing my best to learn and enjoy the process here.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

wow, lots of slacking ITT. Some updates:

I've had the vifa tweeters in for awhile now. The peerless HDS woofers/vifa tweets are a HUGE sq improvement over just rolling with the pro audio stuff in the back deck. Still tuning everything of course. I do NOT have the alpine pxe-h660 processor hooked in yet. I will not be doing any work on this, with the exception of minor tuning, until spring break which is march 12th-17th for me. School and work are way too busy.

In the meantime, some more pics

this was a poor choice.

sanded down some

made cutouts in the plastic so the tweeter's butt end has room

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

don't worry, the black paint is just temporary. The tweeter holders will be covered with a dark grey grill cloth that vaguely matches my interior. But for now, just painted black.

they're set up so that i'm more or less on axis at the listening position.

also, deadened/soundproofed the rear doors

worked on interior LED's some:

i'm happy with how the driver's side turned out but the passenger blue's need re-aiming. Fo sho.

oh, and this feels like spousal abuse //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/frown.gif.a3531fa0534503350665a1e957861287.gif :

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

and again, lots of major slacking here....not really, i've been trying to work ~15 to 20 hours a week and i've got 17 credit hours this semester, so believe me I stay busy.

First off: Had to gut the system. The stuff in the trunk looked like crap. There was a busted air shock (that turned out not to be the problem, but we'll get to that later). Something was screwy and my system didn't sound right. I needed to finished up the tweeters in the front. I REALLY need to wire in the pxe-h660. Wiring was a bit (okay, a huge) mess. Blah blah blah, you get the point. I decided, among other things, it was time to step back a little and spend more time strategizing and making sure things got done right.

Cool story bromato, whatever. On to more pics.

Heres what the trunk looked like when we left off:

Here's a before picture of my car's "stance":

you'll notice how the car, to be blunt, sags like a mofo. For a guy like me, this is unacceptable. Plus, I knew it was riding completely on the coil springs and that the air-assist shocks were not inflating properly. My best guess was that the problem was caused by a leaky air shock - passenger side was replaced in 2010 so I decided to go after the driver's side air assist shock.

It looks ugly.

and...now the fun part. How the fudge do I get at the rear strut tower with all this crap in here? My original idea was to rip the back panels off, do my thing, and then cut new ones. Instead, I decided to remove the woofers, cut a hole in the side of the box where the bolt was, and do all the work through the woofer holes.

This.....this was painful.

I basically made the hole JUST big enough for a wrench, then got in there and did my thing.

new air-assist shock went in without incident. It actually would've been an easy job, if I hadnt had to remove my back seat, remove my woofers, cut a hole in my box, and do all the work through a 14.625" diameter hole.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

okay, so the new shock is on. Again, cool starry bra. Does that fix the problem? No. Turns out that the real problem was that the car's compressor for these things was completely torched. When I took it off the car to attempt service, most of it just fell to pieces, all rusted out and stuff. Then, when I opened it up, it was so clogged up with salt and whatever else I decided it just wasn't worth my time. I did clean it, lube it, and try it tho....to no avail

At the moment, my air assist shocks are manually controlled - I can inflate them and deflate them with an outboard compressor as needed. For now, it's working fine, but in the future i might build a DIY automatic leveling system. Easy stuff, actually, because the sensors are already there.

you can see that actually having air in the system makes a huge difference, and the car now appears to sit approximately correct.

So, who cares about this boring crap, what about the sound system? At the point right before I gutted everything, i was thinking to myself that my car used to sound awesome on certain songs and on some of those, it didn't anymore. When I removed the woofers, one of the motors was almost completely unscrewed - barely hanging on by a couple of threads. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that was the cause. The woofer is not damaged at all so all I need to do is tighten everything up before I put it back and i should be fine.

"While i'm in there", i decided to add more bracing and glass. I'm not 100% convinced that the box is really strong enough and well enough braced at this point and I want to address this issue as much as possible without a rebuild. Also, I need to patch that gaping hole in the side of the box.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

and...time to start redoing the trunk.

I got really sick of looking at bare MDF and always having to worry about it getting wet:

it will probably get at least 3 coats before i'm happy, I want everything to be at least somewhat protected and look halfway decent.

I might need to re-do the grounds as well. You'll notice that, after one buffalo winter, they already look like they're survived (barely) a war

And of course, a streak of horrible luck I had with this thing - I was about to take a trip down to boston, and when putting the tire back on after fixing the air shock, this happened:

yup....if I got a flat, I was SOL. And then, a wheel bearing blew on the way home from boston!! Blah.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

So that's about it for now, i'm really, really hoping to at the very least have the sub stage back together and some semblance of a system (even if it's just the subs and the pro audio components again) by the end of april or so, i'm not sure if its going to happen because i'm busting my hump at school and work but we shall see.

Also, i've got a brake upgrade on the way - going from 11" to 12" rotors in the front

got some calipers and brackets from a totaled monte. I'll be replacing all the rotors with drilled/slotted, putting on ceramic brake pads, and hopefully painting the calipers gloss black as well. That should do it for exterior appearance mods, and have the added benefit of me actually being able to stop this thing. The current brakes are so bad that I can't even get the ABS to kick on in dry conditions - not good. Plus with the added weight of my system and all, I really need to be able to stop.

More to come soon hopefully, and I promise that when it gets put back together i'll get some vids up this time around!! Stay tuned.

 

[martiandancer31 10+ year member]

it's been over a month since i've seen this beautiful site...

boom!! Still got some work ahead of me to get this thing thumping again, but it's mostly wiring stuff up at this point, i'll need to build something to hold the amps in the trunk, and support the pxe-h660 processor as well as the 3Sixty.2 that's on its way to me right now. Lots of tuning too...

in the meantime tho i should have a video of something up within a week or two

 

[SuperSaeYoung]

What an awesome build. Would love to see it when everything is put together.