Continuing work on the speakers

I've got both speakers painted now as the weather has been pretty good in London. I did one coat of primer, 3 coats of undercoat, and 3 coats of satin. The finish is pretty smart and it'll fit in nicely with the white interior I'm putting in Jim. The panels I'm lining Jim with and building the furniture out of are laminated plywood; I considered building the speakers out of the same material but I wouldn't have been able to produce the curved section as the polypropylene laminate would have either cracked or prevented me from getting the tight radius. I'd have also felt obliged to cover the plywood edges with teak mouldings as I'm doing elsewhere, which is pretty absurd even by my massively opulent standards.

I've had the time to load the driver and fit the hardware to one of boxes .

 

I haven't installed the headunit or amps into Jim yet, but I had a chance to listen to the one I loaded yesterday in the house with my hi-fi. I tested the speaker off of a Crown DC300 amplifier which puts out a maximum of about 175w per channel at the 8ohm load this speaker presents . First impressions are great, the sound is awesome and f*ck me does it go loud. I may have tuned it a little high as it doesn't go as low as I expected, at a guess I'd say it starts rolling off about 70hz, but I'll play around with the ports this weekend.

Playing it alongside one of my bookshelf hifi speakers, it sounds clearer, without the boomy bass and missing midrange that a lot of small hifi speakers have. It doesn't go as low but the hifi speaker was making death noises when this speaker was only just getting warmed up! I threw most of one side of the amp into it and I got scared before it showed any signs of distress. Both of these together in Jim will be able to go louder than I'll ever need for sure, and plenty loud enough to drown out the 230 horses screaming under the cab when crawling at high revs up long ascents.

Here's a brief video to give you an idea of the sound. The camera mic was distorting when I got too close. I apologise for the wonky view and explicit music! I hadn't realised the track was quite so offensive until I listened back! Send your kids out of the room before you listen to the clip!