Here's one of my more recent installs. This car belongs to one of my best friends, who also happens to be the mechanic who helped me make all the magic happen in my Saab. So everyone give a round of applause for Jason! Hooray!
This car is a little monster. As a Nissan mechanic, he gets all kinds of great deals when cars, broken beyond repair, come into his shop. This S13 240sx had perfect body shape, but it was pissing power steering fluid and had well over 300tkm on the stock engine (that's near 200 thousand miles on a sports car -- Yay Nissan!). After picking the car up for a bargain, Jason and I spent many evenings at his shop doing an S14 SR20DET engine swap. The SR20DET is an insanely robust 2 liter turbo block from Japan with variable valve timing in the S14 and newer models.
Meanwhile, I was going crazy on eBay buying all kinds of tuning parts for him. Racing radiators, electric fans, front mount intercooler, and all sorts of fun stuff. There is a full HKS 3.3" exhaust, with Megan headers and downpipe. Needless to say, even without tuning this car, it has serious balls. We are still working out the kinks in the swap, but this summer we should be tuning the hell out of it. Look forward to a post in the "post your ride" section!
Stereo
Anyways, this post is not about the car. Unfortunately I am missing pics of the amp install, but I will get them up ASAP.
The door panels in this car were a serious bitch. There is a stock powered 4x6 installed in each door, tilted up and into the door grilles. This made installing anything but a 4x6 a pain in the ass. Since Jason is a big MB Quart fan (he used to run a set of Reference 216's I had picked up from brenz waaay back on the PG Soundoff forum), we sourced some Reference shallow-mount 5.25's. Taking a trace from the stock speaker enclosure, we made some baffles, and mounted the shallow drivers in an enclosure on the back. This way we could just barely fit under the door panel, while having a sealed pod for the speaker to play in. Ugly, but they work, and you don't see them below the grilles anyways.
Tweeters were installed up near the mirrors... just like the door panel, they BARELY fit in. As you can see, I had to go very close to the bottom of the panels to get them in. After fudging with the panel a bit after the pictures, we managed to get a 1mm gap below the mounts.
The deck is an Alpine 9853. We also installed some matching cobalt gauges in the DIN slot underneath (they are recessed because he did not want to cut holes in his stock panel). These gauges will be moving up into a pod cluster on the dash this summer.
This is where I would show you pictures of the trunk, but unfortunately it slipped my mind to take some while the car was still on the road. Basically we are running the Quart's actively off of a ZX450 (from Dr. Fosgate), and a pair of Xmax 10's off of a ZX500. Both amps are mounted to the back of the rear seats, through metal. The battery has been relocated to the trunk, with 0 gauge power and ground feeds going to the front of the car.
So yeah, that's basically the status update on our project car. Expect to hear a lot more when it starts warming up.
As always, I have lots more pictures:
http://photo.stipud.com/240sx/
240sx
Just some crappy wood board we had lying around, which we painted black so that it wouldn't be visible through the grilles. The pictured baffle looks a lot worse than the one on the other side for some reason, even though we used the exact same cutout. We did a bit of trimming after taking the picture to get the door panel to fit over it.
You can't really tell from this picture, but the grilles are literally touching the door panel. Unfortuantely they are a little shorter than a 5" driver, so fitting it was a pain.
