1995 Acura Integra low budget fun build

C

casey

Noob
Forgot to post this here whoops!

Due to some unfortunate circumstances I no longer have my 2008 civic that I did my previous build in
Ive decided to make the best of the situation and purchased a 1995 Acura Integra. Ive never owned anything other than a honda and know these in and out. They are reliable, easy to work on and have tons of potential for cosmetic and performance upgrades.

The car I picked up is rough around the edges cosmetically on the exterior and a few things in the interior, but it is a SOLID car and I got a ridiculous deal on it. 3 NC owner, no accidents, completely stock. Just what I was looking for as buying a used car, and especially a honda can be sketchy. The owner I purchased it from was a retired NC State professor and he knew the owners before him so I had no doubts I was getting a good car.

In addition to the audio, I will be restoring/modding/upgrading the car and will keep those updates in this thread too, just in case anyone cares.

Onto a few pics of the car and what I have going on so far:

first are the day I picked it up. The car ran and does run fine but I had a very mechanically inclined friend go with me and take his trailer. We did a thorough inspection and negotiated a price and loaded it onto the trailer.










Got it tagged and titled and found out immediately that the front speakers didnt work at all. Wasnt sure if it was wiring or blown speakers. I decided to pull the door panels to look into the issue.

I had a tough time pulling the door panels. They were on TIGHT. I am pretty certain they had never been pulled based on the effort it took me to get them off. I found the reason for no sound up front:

21 year old OEM speakers had completely deteriorated



Not having any rings/baffles for the speakers Im using, I simply swapped the rear panel speakers into the front doors. I did not get pics as this was a 5 minute job. They ended up being some Pioneer low low end coaxials. Better than stock and much better now that they were playing in front of me.
 
Since the plan is to restore and repaint, I checked the condition of the pain in the jambs the same day since it was nice and I had time. All it took was wiping them out with some basic cleaner and then I rubbed a very minor polish on them to take off any oxidation.

Before:



After:



not too bad! Its crazy what sun fade does to OEM honda red.

Onto a little more cleaning/restoration. The floor mats werent in horrible shape and theyre just going to get stepped on anyway. New OEM mats are $300 since they are discontinued and in demand, so for now, I decided to clean mine with carpet cleaner

Before:



After:



not sure where my drivers side pics went but it has more wear but still isnt beat.

The tail lights on the car are pretty oxidized and the plastic trim faded. I picked up a set of JDM ones online for a good price. They are not much different than USDM but JDM parts generally have very low miles (under 60k)

as received:



after cleaning and polishing them with my orbital buffer, they came out nice and glossy:

 
I removed the seats front and rear to clean the interior out. I once again used my carpet cleaner (red devil handheld, its pretty handy) to clean the carpet. The results are worth the hour it took.







Horrible pic but here are the rear seats after being cleaned and not dry yet. These are USDM Integra type R seats I have bought to replace the originals. They are in better shape than what I had and red stitched with alcantara and tweed centers. If I find another set in even better shape I may swap again.




This past week I ordered a Pioneer 80PRS. Knowing the Pioneer platform from my previous 99RS I decided to take it a step down but stay with something familiar. I picked it up from Jet.com for 203 shipped, good catch I saw from the thread on here.

Here is the head unit that was in it I removed:



Luckily when it was installed, a plug in harness was used to wire it to the honda wiring. They used these garbage things though, which I removed:

 
I reused the stereo install harness and wired it to the pioneer harness with solder connections and heatshrink, with a couple of loose zip ties to tidy up:



Plugged it in and hung over to start RCA wiring:



I had some high end Monster Cable RCA that I used previously in my S2000 stereo build that I ran. I secured them with some foil ducting tape Ive had good luck with and zip tires under the rear seat running them with OEM wiring.

Coming out of the center console down the shifter channel



under the carpet on the passenger side of the shifter channel



under the rear seat:



Next I started on the power wire routing. There is a grommet beside the battery that I snipped on until I could fit the 4AWG wire through it.



I ran this down the passenger side channel but did not get any pics.[/QUOTE]
 
Once I got the Pioneer in I decided to play with it a bit with the cheap pioneer coax up front just to see what they could do. I started to mess with time alignment and I got it dialed in pretty quick once I figured out the menus in the head unit. Doing 2 locations up front as opposed to 6 separate cut down the time it took significantly.

First impressions: It sounded WAY better than it should lol. I noticed a couple of nasty peaks but I cant recognize a specific frequency by ear, so I went thru the EQ and made some basic cuts so the cheap speakers werent biting my head off. It smoothed it out pretty well.

Next step was to try something Ive wanted to do a while, which is rear fill. I pulled some Boston Rally 6.5 mid bass out of my storage unit that ive owned for 14 years. They dont even fit in the stock location but I wedged them in as a temporary solution to see if I would even like it.

A little more time alignment and playing around and I got them to dial in. It was interesting. I had the right more attenuated than the left as it was almost on axis, and the left behind me is blocked a bit by the seat. I ended up with -6 left, -10 right. Using Erins time alignment calculator once I got my initial values in, made the whole setup POP. They really dont pull the stage back but give the setup a more "full" sound. Hard to explain but its noticeable enough for me and two other people Ive tested to hear the difference with eyes closed.
 
Next thing I did was put my amp in. I have not wired anything up besides power and ground so that I could power the sub up. So my last build was multiple class A/B. This time around I wanted convenience, lower current draw and smaller size. After a little research I decided I wanted an Arc Xdi1100.5 and worked out a deal with Steve at Syracuse Customs for one. This thing is awesome! great layout, tiny, and powerful at 150x4 at 4 ohms and 500x1 at 2ohms.

With my iPod Classic on top for a size reference:



And as for the sub, I kept one of my SI BM MkIV because they impressed the hell out of me in my last car and once again, the less space and weight the better. I ended up finding a box at a local shop for $35 that is .65 cu ft. A little large for the subs intended specs but seems to be fine so far.




Erin came in handy once again. The trick he taught me on sub time alignment is to play the crossover freq of the mid bass to sub and move the TA until it has the most output. Two minutes later and Im set on that.
 
So currently here is the setup:

Pioneer 80prs
Pioneer flea market spec 6.5 coaxials up front
Boston Rally 6.5 mids rear
ARC Xdi1100.5 (only powering the sub currently)
SI BM MkIV in a premade .65 box

After a couple questions with Erin, I changed the rear TA a couple clicks.

As for how it sounds? It has made me laugh while listening simply because the most important speakers are junk, the rears are playing 100hz up on a mid bass, and I have less than a half hour in fiddling with the tune. The front speakers are below my knees but the stage height is right above the dash, which surprised the shit out of me. Imaging is pretty decent, not pinpoint but I wasnt expecting that either.

Yes it has rattles in the doors as there is absolutely no deadening yet. Is it going to win any competition? Definitely not.

What it does do is provide a fun setup that im not going to nitpick to death and just enjoy.

Next plans are to add in the front door speakers I purchased. I found a set of Morel Integra hybrids for under $200 shipped on ebay. I picked them up before I even had a car. They are practically mint, but missing the crossovers. I originally was going to run them active, 150 per mid and tweeter, but that plan has changed.



with the added rear fill that I seem to enjoy, I bought a zapco crossover set for the Morels. It probably crosses them a bit higher than the Morel xovers(which cross the serious tweeter on these at 2500hz 12/db) but they will work for now. I plan to bridge the channels on the arc for 300 watts a channel at 4 ohm to send to the passive front speakers, and run rear fill on head unit power. Plans for that are probably going to be Dayton 5.25 classics. They are cheap and efficient at 92db.

Thats it so far. Questions, comments, criticism, let me know!
 
I am pretty sure it would take a lot better than $100 set of pioneers to sound better than the morel hybrids. they are among my favorites
 
I know. I was kidding. It can only get better from here :) I ordered 20 SDS CLD tiles and some butyl rope. Hope to get the doors knocked out on Thursday
 
we will see if these monster cables i paid too much for are worth it i suppose :P

If not, itll be a 10 minute fix
 
Got quite a bit done the past two days since I have Wednesday and Thursday off this month. I decided to bite the bullet and tackle running wire to the doors first. I was almost going to pay someone to do it simply because Im lazy but I had a garage available with decent lighting so I took advantage

I didnt get a ton of pics but heres what I took:


For starters, you have to pull the fenders to get to the plug on the chassis side. On top of that, you need to pull the front bumper to pull the fenders. Always fun. I took as little off as necessary as their is a bolt at the bottom of the fender to fully remove it, however you have to pull the side skirts to get to it. No thanks lol



I took one look at the Molex plug on the door side and decided my Knukonceptz 14awg wire wasnt going to work. Quick trip to Lowes hardware at 8pm to get some OFC 18awg wire. You can see it partially ran with the chassis side plug pulled



drilled out the plug carefully and got the wire through. As you can see, not much room, even with the 18awg



bad pic of the female side



popped the chassis grommet back in



door side back in place



And repeat for the drivers side, didnt take repetitive pics of that side as it 99% the same
 
Today I received my CLD and butyl rope from SDS. I left my car at my parents and borrowed one of theirs last night so the door panels were already off. I started by pulling off all the old plastic weather barrier and then cleaning up the caulking adhesive used to hold it on.



some products:





The baller Pioneer coax that are in the doors currently



SDS butyl rope



No application pics since its pretty straightforward but here is the SDS CLD applied (sorry for the horrible lighting in the first pic). All in all, I used 8 tiles per door. I can always add more down the road but I felt this was a good starting point based on the coverage I got



large pieces on the outer skin



butyl rope on the crash beam



tile and rope

 
next I applied my Raamat CCF with its adhesive backing. In addition to that, I taped down the door harness with the foil ducting tape to prevent movement/buzzing. I also used the ccf under the speaker mounting to decouple it/pad it from the metal door.




I didnt take pics of the driver side as it came out practically the same. I did find out why my driver window sounded like it was banging against metal. Apparently it was banging against metal. Derp. The rear channel rubber was sitting in the bottom of the door. I cleaned it up as it was pretty beat up and reinstalled and then sprayed the front and rear channels of both doors with wd40 dry silicone lubricant.



and last but not least, I connected the 18awg to my 14awg to run to the amp. My soldering gun was not getting very hot and the solders were cold and came out like shit but theyll do. Ive had the soldering gun for 16 years so its had a good life but it may be time to buy a new one.





I dont have any of the trunk yet simply because its all just laid out. Now that I have everything ran I am going to find a way to mount the amp and get the box attached to the rear seat to hold it up since it is tall and narrow.

After running wire into the doors, I dont see a reasonable way of running active point sources in the doors :( so the Morels are up for sale.

I decided to go ahead and run the fronts off amp power. Currently they are bridged getting 300 watts a side. I have only listened to it about 15 minutes but WOW is it going to sound great with some quality speakers up front. These little Pioneers arentt doing bad at all on the power Im throwing at them. I set gains with a -10db tone on front channels and sub. The sub output is a little low so I will probably adjust it a tiny bit when I have time. On the head unit, giving it 3-4 db puts it about where I want it.

As for what speakers Im going to go with? I am going to give Audiofrog GS62 coaxials a try. Andy has put a lot of time and knowledge into his speaker line and Ive yet to hear or see anything that would indicate Id be disappointed.

I am currently having customer MDF rings/mounts made that will mimic the OEM plastic mount but allow an oversized 6.5" to be mounted.

Im sure some are wondering why Im not just going 2 way front active or passive so Ill answer. 1) I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. 2) I dont feel like dealing with mounting tweeters as I would only be happy with them molded into the pillars
3) I have limited processing and want to keep rear fill (for now) 4) A passive component set wont image like these coaxials since Im dealing with time aligning a mid and tweeter from basically the same location. 5) IT SOUNDS GREAT. It has a little rainbowing of the stage height but overall it is higher than I imagined it would be
 
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i'm excited to hear those GS62's if that is indeed what you end up with. they do look good. i actually strongly considered running audiofrog in the fit but jeremy offered me a deal on his used legatia 2 way from his r32. if i had known you were ditching the morels i could've given you a deal on the imagines :)
 
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