The stock location for the JBL Sub is way too small for any decent sub. I am installing a Rockford Fosgate P3D2 sub that needs 1.0 Cubic Feet of Airspace to breathe. There just is not enough space without stealing the existing spot for the JBL, but I didn't want to buy a JBL panel and modify it. So I decided to build a custom box out of fiberglass and MDF and pray that online tutorials in fiberglass would give me a clue.
1. DO NOT BUY FIBERGLASS AT HOME DEPOT / LOWES / WALMART. The stuff sucks. Go to a boating place like West Marine. The bondo brand crap never set up and we had to start all over.
2. Do not use painters blue tape. It does not stick well enough. Again, this taught us a brutal lesson in lost time. Go with the next grade up from painter's tape.
So those lessons learned, next lesson was we rebuilt the mold out of the good sticky stuff and covered up the electrical outlet / cigarette lighter outlet with tape. What we did not do and now know TO DO is cover the tape with a thin coat of carnuba wax, then hairspray the wax. The wax acts as a release agent and the hairspray coats it and lets the epoxy stick. So your mold releases right off. We started doing this midway through after we almost broke the first try at the glass job simply trying to get it out of the mold.
Then we started laying down the glass. We used a two part epoxy from West Marine combined with fiberglass tape. It is way stronger than the "mat" that they sell, but takes more coats. Takes about 15-30 minutes between coats to get tacky when you can apply another coat. We did four coats then removed. Here is the first coat.
These are three shots of the fiberglass after it has been removed. We sanded, trimmed the edges, and prepared the mold to fit into the opening. It obviously got dark so we called it for the night. This is what we have for the main section of the mold and we have to work on the rest of the back of the box, but we are cutting MDF to make the top, sides, and front. You want to use as much MDF as possible because it is sturdy, holds its shape, and is flat.
More images to come this week. Just super stoked because this is the first time I have ever glassed anything. My dad worked on boats in SF many years ago and it is a father-son-grandson project.
http://imgur.com/a/ydnc8/all
1. DO NOT BUY FIBERGLASS AT HOME DEPOT / LOWES / WALMART. The stuff sucks. Go to a boating place like West Marine. The bondo brand crap never set up and we had to start all over.
2. Do not use painters blue tape. It does not stick well enough. Again, this taught us a brutal lesson in lost time. Go with the next grade up from painter's tape.
So those lessons learned, next lesson was we rebuilt the mold out of the good sticky stuff and covered up the electrical outlet / cigarette lighter outlet with tape. What we did not do and now know TO DO is cover the tape with a thin coat of carnuba wax, then hairspray the wax. The wax acts as a release agent and the hairspray coats it and lets the epoxy stick. So your mold releases right off. We started doing this midway through after we almost broke the first try at the glass job simply trying to get it out of the mold.
Then we started laying down the glass. We used a two part epoxy from West Marine combined with fiberglass tape. It is way stronger than the "mat" that they sell, but takes more coats. Takes about 15-30 minutes between coats to get tacky when you can apply another coat. We did four coats then removed. Here is the first coat.
These are three shots of the fiberglass after it has been removed. We sanded, trimmed the edges, and prepared the mold to fit into the opening. It obviously got dark so we called it for the night. This is what we have for the main section of the mold and we have to work on the rest of the back of the box, but we are cutting MDF to make the top, sides, and front. You want to use as much MDF as possible because it is sturdy, holds its shape, and is flat.
More images to come this week. Just super stoked because this is the first time I have ever glassed anything. My dad worked on boats in SF many years ago and it is a father-son-grandson project.
http://imgur.com/a/ydnc8/all
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