PG Astra Australia Demo Car - 2013 - 159.5dB @ 41Hz

[ttocs]

pretty sure the chance of snow where he is, is pretty low this time of year.............

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

pretty sure the chance of snow where he is, is pretty low this time of year.............

Prett sure Starunit10 was just talking about my trip to Canada this week...and yes I do need my Jacket, there's about 6" of snow here right now and it's -10c tonight

Cheers,

Scott

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Hi All,

Once again it's been quite awhile since our last update, so I thought it might be time to let you all in on what we've been up to in the last 6 months.

Basically what's been happening is that the car has been breaking itself apart, we have now fixed various things about 6 times. The box itself is tearing itself
apart, cracking the baffles apart and the rear wall (nearly 2" thick of plywood) was flexing about 3/4 of an inch, theis in turn ended up breaking our amplifier
rack a number of times. We broke a windshield, and tore the sheet metal mounting flange off of the car.

To sum up, basically every show that we attended we ended up breaking something fairly major and needed to spend a couple weekends fixing it.

Just so you know at that point we were doing about mid 156dB at 36Hz on music.

From there we had the roof repaired and a stripper pole installed. This brought us up into the Mid 158's still around 36-37Hz on music, but the box kept
breaking.










So we decided to add more bracing, the box was already braced internally every 12", but we decided to add more 2x4' to brace it every 6"

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

After that we decided to take the BIG step and line the box with 10mm Plate Steel and add some much needed bracing:

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Plate Steel continued






On the cosmetic side of thins we opted to simply sandblast and clear coat the metal, it looked so tough that to paint it and hide it would have been a shame:







The rebuild isn't finished, but we are on the home stretch... here's a quick preview of a few things:
New fully sealed B-Pillars instead of just press fit panels:

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Some new lighting options:







Soooo with the box not flexing as much, and with the B-Pillars sealed up, we are hoping to join the new 160dB Team, but we know that it's a HUGE leap from 158.6
up to 160dB... We just HOPE we've done enough - Time Will Tell!!!

Cheers,

Scott

[stipud]

Oh my god

Is this still a leased vehicle?

[ttocs]

Why didn't you go with aluminum over the steel for the weight reduction?

[Drock]

This is a crazy build. I wish I had that level of skills. Just to say I did that would make it all worth while.
The old amp rack was crazy. How many amps is that.?

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Why didn't you go with aluminum over the steel for the weight reduction?

One of the guys helping with the project - his brother inlaw has a steel fabrication company, so we took advantage of that situation. Aslo as for additional weight, we have already upgraded the rear suspension, and the steel only added about 70kg to the weight

I'm no expert either but the boys seemed to think that 10mm Steel would also be stiffer than 10mm Aluminium - and since we had not more room, 10mm was the absolute thickest we could go with.

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

This is a crazy build. I wish I had that level of skills. Just to say I did that would make it all worth while.
The old amp rack was crazy. How many amps is that.?

The old amplifier rack was running 9 of the Ti1500.1 amplifiers (1250w RMS each) so producing just over 11,250w RMS

The new amplifier rack is running 6 of the ELITE.1's (rated at 3,200w RMS but Birth certificates at just over 4,100w RMS) so producing around 24,600w RMS -- we also added a few more batteries, so we now have a total of 11 of the Stinger SPV69's (for a total of 759aH and 8525CCA)

[Kirghiz]

Your sub enclosure doubles as protection from roadside bombs.

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Your sub enclosure doubles as protection from roadside bombs.

HaHa - only if you're 'inside' the sub box, and it's just stupidly loud inside of there

[MW3]

Hurry up and finish that sucker!!!

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Hi All,

OK it's done!!!! As per ususal there was an extreme lack of sleep, but we made it to the show and had an awesome time!!!

The updates you saw earlier were a little misleading, we wanted to keep a few tings secret until the big debut. So there was a lot more work happening behind the scenes than just the steel work and B-Pillars. Here's what you missed:

All new graphics

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Also because of the new 10mm steel plate at the rear of the box, our old speaker pods would no longer fit, so we decided to go a little bit crazy...and we continued this theme onto some new side window pods too... There's now 56x 4" Coaxials

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

The Wheels got Painted a matching Yellow to the new graphics



B-Pillars got painted, with a bit of help from our custom garage heater




Added some lighting

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

...and the Final outcome








Soo Close and sooo Happy - pretty good reading for the car after 5-6hrs of demos! This was 41Hz but the car seems to like anything from 40-43Hz... What we really like is being able to sit on 157-158's with music for an entire song, and sitting on 155-156 all day long

A few more tests and tweaks and we 'might' find our missing 0.5dB - Woot!

Huge thanks to everyone involved in getting this car to where it is today!!!

More videos and minor updates to come - Stay Tuned

Scott

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Quick video of the build and footage from the weekend!

[ttocs]

Did you have any licensing problems with the music? Anytime I tried to put a regular song on there youtube would block it.

[dbjury]

If you could stop doors from flexing would that give you your magic figure? Are you allowed to make something that pulls the doors shut tighter or do they have to be only on factory latch. I don't have exp building spl but just chucking thoughts out there.

I'm not a fan of the multiple little speakers but must be loud huh.

[AVICJR]

Great job! Can you please give us a final list of equipment used in this install?

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Did you have any licensing problems with the music? Anytime I tried to put a regular song on there youtube would block it.

We've run into issues once or twice before, but it seems like if we choose older songs, then there are fewer issues... We always try them before posting them up now (got caught out a few times with videos that wouldn't play on phones and tablets)

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

If you could stop doors from flexing would that give you your magic figure? Are you allowed to make something that pulls the doors shut tighter or do they have to be only on factory latch. I don't have exp building spl but just chucking thoughts out there.

I'm not a fan of the multiple little speakers but must be loud huh.

When we did the 159.5 we had a couple of BIG dudes holding the door, but it's hard to hold both the top and the bottom. What's also worrying is that the roof is moving quite a bit again, even with the stripper pole installed, so we might look at more reinforcing up there.

As for the plethora of 4" I agree, but due to the size limitations and the sheer amount of midrange required to keep up with the bass, we had very few options, and of course we wanted to keep it all PG gear and not go down the PA road.

We tried our best to make them look asthetically OK, but they still need some final work to clean them up

[Phoenix Gold Oz]

Great job! Can you please give us a final list of equipment used in this install?

Thanks for that!

OK here's a basic rundown:

4pr of Ti65CS in the front doors
28pr of R4CX
- 9pr per side window
- 5pr per side of the amp
- one speaker is hidden underneath the rear pod firing down at the batteries to get and even impedance load of 4ohm per channel
5x SD500.4
- 1x running 2x Ti65CS per channel at a 2ohm load
- 3x running 4x R4CX per channel at a 4ohm load
- 1x running front channels with 4x R4CX at a 4ohm load

12x ELITE.12d
6x ELITE.1
- each ELITE.1 is running 2x ELITE.12d wired to a 1ohm load
- each ELITE.1 runs a top and bottom sub per location (eg. Top and Bottom Middle Rear) this way we can 'try' to match output levels regardless of slight impedance changes due to speaker locations in the box
11x Stinger SPV69's
- 1x in the stock location inthe engine bay
- 4x in the spare tire well
- 6x underneath the rear amp rack

Other than that there's lots of Stinger 6000 series RCA's, lots of 5000 Series 0ga and connectors, fused distro's and circuitbreakers, and my FAVOURITE ITEM of ALL TIME - the LC1 RCA Level Controller - Affectionately NickNamed "The WHOMP Knob!"

Hope this helps answer any questions?

Scott