Step Son's 2008 Charger

[pocket5s]

A couple months ago my step son got his bought his first nice car, a 2008 5.7 hemi charger. He brought it over to show us and it wasn't but 30 minutes into talking when he said he wanted to put some nice music in it. Naturally I was thrilled He's been playing guitar for about 12 or 13 years so he has a good background in music, but never had anything remotely serious to listen to. After he spent some time in my charger he knew what was achievable so was willing to put in some work to get.

The goal build wise was to not go too crazy (like mine), keep it budget friendly yet be a big improvement over stock.

With that in mind, we worked out the following equipment:

A new Clarion HU from Crutchfield, which of course came with the mounting kit.
A mono alpine amp from several years ago that he already had.
A new 4 channel alpine amp for the front
An Arc 6.2 component set I got in a raffle at Erin's GTG a couple years ago that's been sitting on my shelf
Sundown SD-2 8" sub
The new JL Audio Twk DSP. I was a beta tester for the unit so I had it on hand and it can't work in my car so we put it to use.
And of course new distro blocks, fuse holder, wires, etc.

I let him do all the sweaty work while I guided and mostly watched

[pocket5s]

We started with the head unit installation, which was pretty straight forward. Install wise, these first gen chargers are MUCH easier to work with as a regular head unit setup will work, unlike my oem integrated system.

Here he's removing the oem piece


Gutted


While he was working on that, I decided to put the led that comes with the TwK remote into a blank spot next to the hazard signals button.







We didn't find out till it was all powered up that the led is REALLY bright. During the day it isn't so bad, but at night, wow... JL said they are working on a means of toning it down.


Head unit installed:

[pocket5s]

The next bit was deciding what to do with the TwK remote knob. We talked about a few options, but settled on the ashtray. He doesn't smoke, and won't be using the remote for volume work, so it worked out nicely and it tucked away but still in easy reach.

First thing I did was remove the ashtray.


It wouldn't fit in the ash holder itself, so I removed the lighter and decided to put it in there, where the hole it in the above pic.

I started on making an abs round blank to fill in the hole, but that was more trouble than it was worth. Ultimately I made a piece the fit behind the hole with the remote mounted to that. I wasn't thrilled with the finished look, but he didn't care and I honestly didn't want to spend more time on it that I had already put in.

Here is it mounted up:

[pocket5s]

next was the doors. I let him take them all apart, then he made a baffle and got the 6" mounted to it. He also ran all the wiring up in to the door and up into the dash for the tweeter.





Baffle isn't pretty, but it works

Tweeter was mounted in the oem dash location. I did this part.

[pocket5s]

We then prepped the back for mounting the amp rack. We spent some time going over amp locations, sub location, etc. He wanted to retain as much trunk space as possible for his guitars and rilfes and such. So, the amps were installed under the rear deck.

Took the rear deck apart to get the oem speakers out.




Decided to use make a plug over the oem locations and use that as a mounting point for the amp rack to bolt to.



He then worked on making the amp rack out of some 3/4" material I had laying around. Took a while to get it all trimmed up and shaped to fit, but he did well.

We set up all the components on it to work out routing, fitment, etc. and then he installed threaded inserts for all the mounting spots.

After that we covered it with some spare vinyl I had from my build.

Here is a mock up of the components:



Working out wire routing:


Getting it wired up:

[pocket5s]

We got it installed (no pic yet) and wiring run to the battery and did a system check. everything worked on first fire up

I did a quick setup on the TwK to set crossovers and real quick TA to sort of get it centered. A couple days later he came by again and I did some more simple TA to align the drivers together and that's about it. Weather and schedules haven't permitted doing any real tuning so far unfortunately.

However we did start in on the sub enclosure which will be a fiberglass piece in the rear trunk corner. It still isn't done however. something about a new girl friend and "working late", yada yada...

I'll get pics of that work soon.

[Babs]

Nicely done!

[Babs]

something about a new girl friend and "working late"

So that's what they call it now. LOL!

[chithead]

That is a great setup, very envious of the time and patience and knowledge he gained during this. My dad could take apart a short wave radio and put it back together blindfolded, but putting a car radio in? Nope.

[pocket5s]

thankfully he wasn't afraid to do the sweat work, cause I sure wasn't in a hurry to do it in 90+ degree heat!

He's a good kid, and takes direction very well. He does tech work on industrial scales so he wasn't afraid of the electronic aspects of the install. I also let him make a lot of the decisions and the ones he didn't make I explained why we were going to do what we were so he understood as much as he could.

It'll be fun when we get to actually tuning, which I'm sure he will appreciate as well.