Sub Boxes: Build and install them yourself and save!!
Here's the scenario: you're driving down the street listening to your crapmatic factory stereo, when you hear this thumping noise. At first you think your engine's knocking, then you contribute it to maybe loud exhaust. Then you look over beside you and see a couple guys rocking out to tunes with the best sounding bass you've ever heard. You say to yourself "my system sounds alright factory, but it's lacking the thump that those guys have". So you go to your local electronics store and tell them you want more bass in your car. You tell them you like most types of music, have a fairly small car, a tight budget and that you want to keep trunk space and your factory components. So after about a half hour of dickering with the salesman, you wind up with a 10" sub and a 250 watt amp. Hell of a deal!! except for one problem: you need an amp kit and a sub box. Another 150 bucks that you don't have. That's where this comes in handy.
The salesman will tell you all the fancy stuff you need, but 9 times out of 10 he's working on commission and is stretching the truth. If you want to run factory, all you need is a length of 8 awg wire, a fuse + holder, a length of speaker wire, a couple of quick-connect terminals some short RCA cables and a Line Output Converter (more on that later). So you buy all of this stuff and go home to install your amp and run like that until you can afford the sub box you saw for 150 bucks. You get home and are ready to go. First step is to run the 8 awg wire from your battery to your trunk. step one is to cut the wire close to the battery so that you can fuse it. You can mount the fuse holder if you wish, but it is not necessary. Most fuse holders work differently, so get the salesman to explain it to you. DO NOT INSTALL THE FUSE YET!!! You can connect the wire to the battery now or later, it doesn't really matter. Next is to run the wire. Check your firewall for holes or grommets that you can run the wire through. If no holes are free enough, you have one of two options. You can either drill a new hole (If there is a safe area to do so) or you can run the cable over the door hinge and down in through the kick panel. Once the wire is in the interior, Just run it under the sill plate near the bottom of the door when its closed. It's easy to slide in and easy to remove when the time comes. Once you get to the back seat, run the wire between the seat and the side panel. Now your wire is in the trunk where you want it to be. Cut off any excess wire you have and mount it to a piece of metal attached to any part of the body or frame for a ground. NOTE: your ground should be no more than 3 ft. Now you have a couple more options. You need a remote wire to turn your amp on and off. You can do this a couple of different ways. 1. You can run another smaller wire (14 awg) from the battery to the interior onto a switch and then into the trunk. This way you can turn your sub on and off as you wish. Or you can do it the more difficult way and tap into the ignition power wire on the back of the cd player (this requires dash dissassembly and a test light to determine which wire to tap into with a quick-connect). This way the amplifier powers up when your cd player starts. This is a safer alternative as you cannot forget to turn it off. The next thing you have to do is tap into the speaker wires on the speakers in the rear deck with quick-connects to get an audio signal into your amp. If you buy an amp with a High Level Input, it will make life a whole lot simpler. If not you need a line output converter and a short pair of RCA cables. Ask your local electronics store about the LOC, as I'm not a big fan of them nor expert on them. With a few simple connections, you have your amp installed. Everything will be labled on your amp, so it is fairly straightforward. Now, plug in your fuse, turn on your ignition and watch the amp light up.
Now, wiring the sub up is simple, but the box seems to intimidate people. With a few simple tools (table saw, cordless drill, caulking gun) you can have a solid sub box for the fraction of the cost of a store-bought one. The materials you will need are:
That's right. 4 items! All you need to do is measure up the wood, cut it, screw it together, caulk all the inside seams with silicon, let it dry, cut a hole for the terminal cup and the sub(a geometry set compass works best for those two tasks), screw both in, making sure to silicone the cup in good, and hook up the wires and enjoy. I went through it rather quickly I understand, but there is not really a slow way to go through it. One mounting tip on the sub: In a trunk, facing the sub backwards about 6" from the rear of the trunk enhances bass amazingly well. If you have a hatchback, face it up as close to the back as possible.