Every year on the first weekend of November a bunch of folks gather in Dewey, OK the home of the Stray Kat 500 for the Stray Kat Feed. The street is blocked off and we shove as many hot rods and kustoms into the blocked off street as we can and enjoy a potluck style lunch. It’s a great way to gather one last time for the year with the rest of the rod/kustom family and get some quality time together before the weather turns cold.
Here are some cell phone photos from the day, more from the big camera will come tomorrow after I get home. Hope you have had a great weekend!
Okay folks, this is a complete experiment. This is a repost of an article that I did for the Galaxie Club of America Gazette a few years back. If you want more tech articles like this comment below or contact me here to let me know!
Upgrade Your Audio
A few years ago I decided to replace the horribly installed speakers in the rear deck of my Galaxie. The person who’d put them in had used pennies for washers among other sins of installation plus the speakers weren’t all that good. It was time to install some new ones and get rid of the ugly aftermarket speaker grills that were perched on the rear deck. Now I must say this, I am no pro installer, you’ll notice that when you see how straight my cuts are…
As you can see in Picture 1, a previous owner had decided to cut out the factory rear deck wood and vinyl to install a pair of 6×9 speakers. I have to say I HATE to see speaker grills in the rear deck area of a car, 9 times out of 10 they are ugly and out of place. The older (maybe factory) center 6×9 grill is pretty ugly as well, so let’s fix that! The goal for this part of the install was to see if I could put these speakers in without leaving any permanent changes to the car.
In Picture 2 you can see the factory rear deck metal, I have removed the rear seat bottom and back so that I could remove the upholstery that covers the rear deck. I won’t go into detail on how to get the panel out since each model of car is different. Lucky for me, Ford left 4 large openings plus the center 6×9 mount. Since stereo sound works best in the car when you have the most separation between left and right speakers, I am going to install the rear speakers in the far outside openings.
Picture 3 & 4 shows a tool that I have had for years…. And I have no idea what it’s called. It’s an adjustable curve that you can pick up at Hobby Lobby. I use it to copy complex shapes in the car. Here you can see it wrapped around the inside of one of the openings in the rear deck of the Galaxie. Simply fit the curve to the shape you desire to copy, then lay it on a piece of 1/8th masonite and trace the shape. This tool comes in very handy when making cardboard templates for patch panels when doing body work as well.
My idea to build the mounts was to use the small ledge in each opening to my advantage. I built a 1/8th masonite plate that fit into the indented part of the metal, then put another masonite plate under the rear deck and used small bolts to cinch the two pieces together tightly to hold them in place in the rear deck. The speakers will be mounted into the bottom panels. Picture 5 shows the rough shape of the panels with holes for the speaker in each panel. I have also drilled holes for the bolts in the panels at this point. The panel in front is the one that goes on top of the rear deck metal, the square-ish one behind goes below the metal and gets the speaker mounted to it. Next I painted them black so that the wood would not show through the final upholstery. I also used speed nuts to attach the speakers to the bottom panel so that I could remove the speakers from the panel without having to unbolt the panels from the rear deck.
Picture 6 shows the rough fitting. Everything is assembled and loose in the rear deck for adjustment. It should be noted at this point that if you have holes in the upholstery panel over any of the center 3 openings that you should cover the openings so that the sound waves that come from the rear side of the speakers do not come through into the passenger compartment. The rear side of the speaker produces a sound wave that will partially cancel out the sound from the front side so this is very important. I will be building a subwoofer setup that will fill these openings so it is not an issue in my case. Since the subwoofer setup will not be ready until down the road I covered the backside of the speakers with foam baskets to keep the back wave contained.
Picture 7 shows the finished project. The beginning idea of getting rid of the ugly holes and speaker grill and ending up with a clean looking rear deck has been accomplished.
The speakers sound much better and have been providing years of enjoyment now.
See you at a show,
Royboy
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Don’t forget to get your 2014 Calendar for Charity order in ASAP! They’re already going fast, once they’re gone they’re gone!
In 3 weeks (and 2 days) we’ve sold 76 Calendars, awesome!
The printing bill has been paid, more supplies have been paid for and delivered, total outlay is about $1033.41. So far we have taken in about $785 in calendar sales + shipping.
I have used that money plus $248 of my own to cover the printing costs and I will cover the shipping costs out of my own pocket until enough calendars are sold to pay that back. With 8 weeks left in the year we have to average 22 calendars a week and so far we’ve averaged 23 a week. This is where sales usually drop off a bit. Please share the links to the calendars to friends that have bought them in the past or you think would enjoy them, that extra sharing does really help get the word out.
Now the story gets interesting. As I sat down Wednesday evening Oct. 30th to start to assemble the freshly printed calendars I found that they had been printed incorrectly. In order to bind the calendars at the top the pages have to be printed so that the front and the back of the pages have the same orientation of top to bottom. These did not! 250 copies of wasted paper! As of the writing of this post (4am Central time) I have not heard back from the print shop but I left messages at 7pm on 2 voice mail accounts and 1 email. ***Update at 8:30am: The print shop is reprinting them all to be correct and hopefully I’ll be punching and binding 250 copies this weekend. *** Rest assured they will get printed and they will go out as promised.
The Hot Rods, Kustoms and Stray Kat Kustoms Editions are tied for best sellers so far with 22 sold each but I expect the Stray Kat Edition to take a commanding lead this weekend. If you want one you’d better reserve your copy now by ordering today. There will be NO reprints, it’s not cost-effective unless we’re doing a large batch.
Thanks folks for pushing this blog to 18,995 views since Aug. 15, 2013!!! October was the biggest month to date as well! Thanks so much for following my adventures look for feature articles, artist features and more to come!
See you at a show.
Royboy
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