Stupid question for the day....

[jtrosky]

Yeah, since I wasn't able to install things last weekend, I had more time - so I ordered some $8 "carpet" off of Amazon and started working on the board today....




Hope to install the AmpPro4 tomorrow and get this DSR1->AmpPro/Helix upgrade done....

[thedynoguy]

I'm curious - how to you secure your board to the vehicle?

2" aluminium angle stock that I mounted with 5/16" rivuts to the left and rear side of the trunk well. The screw you can see to the right of the AS100.4 is mounted to a post that is attached to the bottom of the trunk well. It's not going anywhere...

[jtrosky]

Up until now, I never really had a good "permanent" mounting solution for mine. What I did does work (been driving around for thousands of miles like that), but it's not proper at all (not even going to spill the beans on how I rigged it up in order to save the embarrassment!).

After thinking about it some more, I think I'm just going to get a spare tire hold-down bolt and simply bolt the board down with it (drill a countersink hole in the middle of the board on top and use a nut to tighten down using the spare tire hold-down bolt). I think that would work fine without having to drill any holes into the car body anywhere (I hate drilling into the body!!).

I just ordered the hold-down bolt - will report back as to how it works.

No experience mounting stuff like this, so I'm winging it...

This is what I'm talking about - the large head "anchors" to the bottom of the spare tire well and then I would cut the bolt to whatever length I need, find a nut for it and then tighten the nut to hold the board down (nut would be countersunk underneath a cut in the carpet, so would not be visible. At least that's the plan... :-)

[jtrosky]

Wow - believe it or not, my redneck-engineered spare-tire hold-down bolt mounting method actually worked! :-) Was a little more work than I expected and kind of hard to make sure I drilled the counter-sunk hole in the amp board in exactly the right spot where the hold-down bolt would come through at, but I managed to get it all right and now my amp board is really secure.

Here are some pictures to hopefully illustrate what I did. This is on a 2018 Dodge Challenger. It does not come with a spare tire - instead it comes with a black heavy-duty styrofoam "organizer" that goes where the spare tire would normally go. The "organizer" has a few different compartments - one to hold a tire inflator and two other general-purpose compartments (the main "large" one and a really small one). It looks like this:


So I decided to install my amps in that large compartment. Since the big compartment has a slope to it, I used a small "support" board at the one end so that the amp board would lay flat in the large compartment - which also allows me to hide all of my wires easily underneath the board:


I also covered the board in some subwoofer-carpet, as recommended above in this thread - and here is the end result - which I was very happy with:


However, I had one problem... The styrofoam "organizer" literally just sits there - it's not "secured" to the car in any way - and the amp board wasn't even secured to the styrofoam "organizer" in any way. So everything was basically just sitting there, completely un-secured.

Since it's such a new car, I really didn't want to drill into the sheetmetal in any way (especially since I really have no experience doing that). So I finally came up with a way to secure the amp board without drilling into the car sheet metal at all. I used this spare-tire/jack hold-down bolt:


This bolt attaches to the bottom of the spare-tire well, underneath the styrofoam "organizer":


Here is the bolt when installed (I also put some heat-shrink over most of the bolt, just do I didn't have any bare-metal in the area underneath the amp board, where all of my wiring is:


So now, all that I had to do was to drill a counter-sunk hole in the amp board so that the bolt would come through the amp board just enough to where I could put a nut on it so that I could tighten the nut in order to secure the amp board. Unfortunately, the hold-down bolt happens to come up right between where my amp and DSP were installed, so I had to remove the amp from the amp board in order to secure the board and then re-install the amp afterwards - which also means that I'll have to remove the amp if I ever need to remove the board for whatever reason - but I shouldn't need to do that very often, so.... Here are some pictures of the bolt coming up through the amp board (since the board was already carpeted, I had to slice a + into the carpet in order to drill the counter-sunk hole and secure the bolt - then I just put the carpet "flaps" back down and put some tessa tape over the slices in the carpet to "finish" the area (this is before I covered the + slices with tesa tape):



After taping up the slices and reinstalling the amp onto the board, this is the end result - completely undetectable:


FInally, when the "trap door" in the trunk is closed, as it normally is, this is what you see when you open the trunk:


Sorry for the super-long post, but I couldn't believe that this worked out so well and wanted to share. :-) Thanks for reading.

[Queef]

Very Nicely Done ! Love it !