1st build log ever. 2001 Nissan Sentra GXE

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Original wis

Noob
This is my first attempt at a build log... This is my first attempt at a serious build. This is all being done solo.

The build:
Front:
Hertz Dieci series DSK 165.3 components
Hertz Dieci series DCX 87.3 coaxials
Rear:
Hertz Dieci series DCX 165.3 coaxials
Subwoofers:
4 CT Sounds Tropo 10" 1.2 net cube per sub tuned to 30hz
Power:
250 amp alternator
60ah AGM under the hood
100ah AGM in rear
2/0 Big 3, fused at alt
2/0 power wire to rear, fused at battery
Amplifiers:
Taramps TS 400x4
Taramps DS 440x4
Taramps Smart 3
I'll post pictures in subsequent posts to show the progression up to this point.
 
The electrical:
All of the wire was purchased from AC Wire and Supply:

This was the first time I've ever done a Big 3 and a battery swap. I thought that routing the power cable to the rear would be difficult but the grommet was easy to access from the inside. I got kinda lucky.

Here's some pictures.
The car:
View attachment 17626
The wiring:
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I ran the cable to the rear without a problem. There's actually some kind of wire trough with plastic clips that's hidden below the passenger and drivers side carpeting.

Took a total 11 hours to do everything including the alternator swap, the battery swap, The Big Three, the grommet through the firewall and running the cable to the rear. Most of that was due to my inexperience. Came out decent but I'm sure there's room for improvement.
 
I ran speedwire from the front cabin to the rear trunk as well. The wire is 14 gauge and has seven individual wires of 14 gauge inside of the big wire which made it easy to run from front to rear.

The hard part was creating a second set of door looms to run two sets of the 14 gauge wire for the component system going in the doors.

I didn't get pictures but I basically had to create door looms by using the $6 ones that they sell on Amazon, threading them through a grommet of the correct size to fit the holes, and rubber cementing the grommet to the door loom. The really hard part was running the wire through the grommet and door loom and the holes that were created in door and the metal on the side of the car where the wire needed to come from.

The door loom is the one on top. The OEM is on the bottom:
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This is where the tweeter wire exits for the panel where the tweeter goes:
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The wire and where it comes out in the trunk:
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To tell the truth I don't even KNOW how many hours it took me to figure that out but I do know that I ran out of curse words. I quickly learned that precision work and tight spaces are not friends.

It worked though. I ran the power wire down the passenger side and the speaker wire down the driver side through the same wire clips.
 
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Next I fabricated or tried to fabricate a place where I could put the tweeters in the plastic panel that covers the mirror electronics. I made a few mistakes and this took me a while to figure out as well.

I cut a hole in the panel using a hole saw then inserted the tweeters casing into the hole. I used glue to stick everything together. Before I put the tweeter in I sanded everything down to make it as even as possible and then coated the entire piece with 12 coats of Krylon spray paint.

View attachment 17631

As you can see it didn't come out as smooth as I intended. I'm still not quite sure why to be honest.

I also removed the rear deck and reupholstered it in black so that it would match the new interior.
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I cut out the speaker holes:
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Then covered the entire deck and black grill cloth:
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I used gorilla glue heavy duty spray adhesive and it worked okay for the most part. There's a few places where I had to use the roller multiple times to get it to stay set and there's a couple places that I missed apparently. Overall for my first time I don't think it looks too bad.
 
Looking good, especially for a first build.

For the sail panels, most interior plastics have some texture to them. If you use something like bed coating they will better match the rest of the interior. Gives you a finish like this

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SublimeZ said:
Looking good, especially for a first build.

For the sail panels, most interior plastics have some texture to them. If you use something like bed coating they will better match the rest of the interior. Gives you a finish like this

attachment.php
Click to expand...

Nice do you think I could realistically send those down and redo them without making them look worse?

And thanks I never knew those were called sail panels.
 
Original wis said:
View attachment 17631

As you can see it didn't come out as smooth as I intended. I'm still not quite sure why to be honest.
Click to expand...

This is something I struggle with all the time! I finally asked the pros how they do it and one answer I was surprised by was "this can of spray paint is $30 each". That particular one resulted in a thick finish without needing multiple coats that would fill in the small imperfections kinda like I think you were hoping for. I couldn't justify buying a whole paint can for a relatively small project like this or the work I did in my car though, so it's a hard one to solve.

I hear other people have good results with Rage Gold filler since it is great to work with and allows to get the shapes you want with the least amount of effort. I, other other hand, usually look for bargains and used the less expensive body filler stuff at the auto parts store and had results that were a solid "meh".

It's hard to make fabrication look easy!
 
First try at sound deadening:

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I'm not sure if it came out well or not. What I did was I took an entire sheet, put it on each side and filled in the rest with the pieces that I cut from the first two sheets. And then I took a third sheet and cut it into pieces as well to fill in as much as possible.

Some things that I learned along the way:

1. Whatever tools you use to cut the butyl should be disposable because it's pretty difficult to get it off of anything.

2. The aluminum is sharp it'll cut you quicker than a paper cut.

3. The best way to clean it is to first take paper towels wet them and wipe up the surface dirt.
Next take a nylon disc rubber pad and some dish soap and scrub off the more difficult dirt.
After that I used a steel dish scrubbing pad the round ones and scraped as much of the difficult dirt off of there as I possibly could.
The car is 21 years old so there was a lot of dust there.
I sprayed it down with a cleaner degreaser and wiped that up with more paper towels.
Then I took additional paper towels and wiped off to make sure that there was no residue left.
The last thing that I did was scrub a microfiber towel over the entire top to make sure that all of the debris was absolutely gone.

4. It was 102° outside while I was doing the work. The Beatles was so soft kind of like almost marshmallow. It pretty much flowed into all of the nooks and crannies like with a few simple presses. So yeah the warmer outside the easier it is to work with.

5. When you start to press it down start from one corner and work diagonally to the opposite corner. There's a couple spaces where my application was off because I didn't do that and parts got scrunched together.

6. Plastic panel tools are great for pressing the butyl and aluminum into tight rings and spaces where a normal roller may not fit.

Overall it was about medium difficulty a little bit better than what I expected but still a lot of work.

Any feedback anyone would care to give?

Thank you,

Lewis King
 
Continuing with sound deadening for the trunk:

I cleaned and degreased the entire trunk as well as the rear seat well. I removed all paneling the back seats and all of the carpet inside of the trunk.

View attachment 17655View attachment 17654View attachment 17653View attachment 17656

Next I used the same process that I used yesterday on the rear deck on the entire back end of the car. I completely cleaned and degreased every single surface in the pictures.

I originally attempted to remove the old sound deadening material that was placed in there 21 years ago by Nissan, but it proved futile. The old material is fused to the body of the car and practically impossible to remove.

I elected to cover it with the new sound deadening material. I'm guessing that those areas will probably have a less effect but given that the rest of the bare metal is being covered completely I guessed that the net effect would still be positive.

The after pictures will be in the next post.
 
Here are the after pictures. I was able to get most of the bottom of the trunk done. I wanted to get all of it done but I pretty much ran out of gas.

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I covered as much of it as I could using whole sheets of Mat 66. That made it much easier to cover a whole lot of space in a minimal amount of time. Once I had the majority of it covered I used to spare cut pieces to fill in the empty spaces as much as possible.

I think I did pretty well for my first time. Any feedback will be appreciated.

Lewis King
 
Original wis said:
Any feedback anyone would care to give?
Click to expand...

My favorite tool to cut materials like this (actually to cut anything) is a pair of sheet metal shears or tin snips. They are like industrial scissors. They can get sticky after cutting butyl but it looks like you know how to clean stuff real good. They are also the perfect tool for opening those damn plastic blister packs that are impossible to open.

Looks like you accomplished your goal and I love how you put so much effort into cleaning the surfaces first to ensure good adhesion. If the butyl was getting super soft at 100 degrees, I might be worried about it holding up in the long term or if it will become drippy and soggy if it heats up too much. I also don't have too much experience with different butyl products so I'm not sure how to judge that.



View attachment 17661
 
Thank you I was wondering what would be better than wasting my exacto knives. I need a better roller and I need a pair of those so that I can cover the entire car.

The crazy thing is I've used maybe a fifth of the material that came in one box so like 10 ft maybe? So I have way more than I need to cover the entire car including the floor, roof and the side panels. I'm adding ccf to the floor as well for insulation so it should be supet quiet when I'm done.
 
CCF won't do a whole lot to prevent road noise, it is good at decoupling panels so they can't vibrate against each other though. You need something like sheet lead or MLV or acoustic insulation or..... to prevent road noise. Car people usually use MLV due to it's cost, its ability to block noise, and its rather thin profile. You can't just shove super thick things under panels and get them to go back together. Sheet lead is better at all of the above, including higher price.
 
Yeah I'm actually putting the CCF for insulation so it keeps the heat out in the summer and the heat in during the winter. I know that the mat 66 and CCF won't prevent road noise but anything that I can do to keep the car cooler and to cut down on any rattles internally I definitely need to do.

Once I put the wheels on the car the rattles really begin to come to the forefront. And considering how bad the roads are in El Paso, the majority of my ride anywhere has now gotten pretty loud in the wrong way.

I can also tell you from experience now that the mat 66 definitely works. I drove my car before and after the initial application and the difference is noticeable.
 
Continuing with sound deadener:

Today I completed the trunk including the lid and the wheel wells and rear corner panels.

The trunk lid was the most difficult part so far. I gave up on trying to place huge pieces and pretty much went rogue. What I did was I started cutting random pieces from what I had left of partials and used that to fill in. Once I had the majority of it done then I used knock testing to identify the places where I needed to add more. There's no echo at all now

View attachment 17668

I completed the rear corner panels as well as the rear wheel wells and I put additional patching on the back of the framing for the seat cutout. I knock tested to make sure it was solid as well.

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I started at 8:00 in the morning but by then it was already almost 85° outside by 10:00 a.m. it was pushing the good 90. I heat tested a couple pieces of Matt 66 by laying them on the hottest part of the driveway directly in the sun to see how they would react. After about an hour of direct sunlight with no shade in 85 to 90° heat they were pretty soft but they definitely were not melting like, to the touch.

So yeah I think if you leave your car in direct sunlight with no shading and no heat protection then you might make a case for it melting but most cars should be able to dissipate the heat before it gets to the material directly unless I'm mistaken. I don't ever remember the trunk of my car being extremely hot when I opened it. The cab of the car yes but the trunk is usually pretty cool even in high heat. I think good tinting and good sun shades with drastically help in the cab of the car.

Either way I'll find out soon enough. It's going to be 90 to 100 here until pretty much Thanksgiving so I'll be able to get a huge sample size.

Side note let's give a loud, rousing round of applause to global warming! :woohoo:

Lewis King
 
I put the parts express sonic barrier butyl rope in my truck and this is what happened. This was on the vapor barrier..
If you really want to test, you need to be able to place it vertically and see if it drips. So if you could place some on a board and put it in the sun vertically, that would be a better test. Don't be like my below pictures. That SUCKED to clean up.

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Completing the rear part of the installation

Completed the sound deadening for the entire rear seating area and rear doors.

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I ran into a couple of problems when I attempted to do the rear doors.

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I made several mistakes with the process for the rear doors but I'm glad that I made them so that I don't repeat them on the front doors where it is more important. The rear doors will not have speakers in them so although I'm kicking myself for making the mistakes it's okay.

My thought process was to take the vapor barrier and use it as a template for the sound deadening. It sounded like a good idea at the time. Turns out that it really wasn't.

Here are the issues that I ran into:

1. There are way too many moving parts, open holes and wire harnesses running through the door to be able to realistically cover the entire thing in the same way that the vapor barrier does without creating issues. It looked nice but when I put the door back together the door lock wouldn't move freely so the solenoid could not activate electronically. Even after taking it apart again and attempting to move the sound deadener to allow more freedom it's still sticking a little. I tried to compensate for my error with the second door. I was a little more successful there but not much

2. I assumed erroneously that the interior of the door is a flat plane and it isn't. So when I went to tuck everything in to the places where I needed to go, it actually shrunk the material to the point where I was unable to complete the vapor barrier idea in a single go. I had to patch in additional pieces of material to compensate.

3. I didn't realize how tight the space is on the interior of a door. My plan was to add sound deadening to the interior metal and CCF to the interior of the plastic on the opposite side to decouple both planes. Turns out that just adding a layer of sound deadener created a lot of fit issues. I had to squeeze things back together until I was able to clip the door back to the frame. I ended up having to use the two screws to really tighten everything together enough so that the clips would even latch. The good news is considering how tight everything was there's no way it should rattle.

4. After I got the doors together for the second time I realized that I'd fail to put sound deadener inside of the holes of the door so that the outside sheet metal wouldn't rattle. :doh:

Dude... Yeah that all happened. I'm obviously going to have to approach the front doors in a completely different way. :shrug:
 
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