So the story to this is a bit crazy.
A couple of years ago I was at the Sundown show in North Carolina with the Chevelle. This show was where we had to go for the Virginia State Finals.
I threw the car together to get it playing and hit the road.
At one point a guy introduced himself as "Nick, from Stereo Integrity".
Aside from the forums I knew nothing about him or his products. I DID have a BM MK IV at the house that belonged to another forum member, but I never did any testing with it.
We chatted for a bit and that was that. I recently told him that I couldn't remember if he listened to the Chevelle that day or not and he said "I didn't get the chance, Bertholomey wouldn't come out"
So fast forward to last November. Nick and Josh came to the meet I had here. I never listened to the Passat - too busy.
He saw the van build I have here and told me he had some subs that would walk all over the 13W7s. I thought "He's in sales mode now" and filed that bit of info away to memory.
So time goes by and we end up talking about these subs. HST-15s. I told him I'm not convinced. All I see is an SPL sub. We talked about things and I told him that I wanted to be able to test these against the 13W7s before telling the customer that this (buying SI 15s) was the better route to take. I had modeled it, but wanted to hear it.
I made the trip to his place and tuned the Passat as much as I could with the processor and other issues we had that day. Brought a HST-15 back for testing.
Long story short, I'm a believer in the SI subs. The HST-15 is a lot like the 13W7 in regard to specs, but Nick was right, the HST-15s out-perform the 13W7s, sound better (shorting rings that the W7 doesn't have make a difference) and don't need as much enclosure space to get their output.
So...I was sold on the HST-15s for the van and Nick asked me if I'd be interested in doing a stealth build in his Audi.
"Sure. Stealth builds are kinda my thing."
We went over plans and discussed the build. The initial plan was a simple stealth install with a SQL-15 in the 2ft^3 sealed enclosure in the spare tire well with his components up front with Sundown's prototype SALT amplifiers powering everything.
Originally the car was going to be here and built so it could get to Bertholomey's meet on May 1st and then...pandemic. Everything got put on hold.
Finally the time comes that things work out and Nick decides to bring the car. He also brought a pair of HS-24s for me to play with. No idea what I'll destroy with those, but they're in the arsenal now.
For those of you that haven't been around a 24" sub, they dwarf everything else. The DD Audio 3015ESPs I have for the Chevelle look small - and DD uses a 18" cone to build the ESP 15s.
So I moved the Audi in and started going over the car to see how well what I wanted to do would work. The idea of stealth mounting the 3" drivers behind the factory tweeter location wasn't going to work so I nixed that idea and put my plan for the doors on hold while I thought about what to do up front.
While thinking over the front of the car I got to work at the rear. To build the 2ft^3 enclosure for the SQL-15 I would need to remove the large hump in the middle of the spare tire well. That hump, on the underside, houses the EVAP canister. I knew that would need to be relocated so I unbolted it and disconnected the lines.
After that I got to work with the drill and drilled out the spot welds for that hump in the spare tire well. After they were drilled I had to crawl under the car, cut through the seam sealer, and separate the hump from the floor pan.
At some point I sliced myself open. Had not idea I was cut, but for some reason my hand felt slimy.
So..I bled on it. It's officially a project now.