Jakosu

Hi! I am thinking about reinforcing my stock kickpanels, they are made of like 2mm plastic and they do vibrate quite much when i crank up the volume, i have some 6.5" infinity kappa speakers mounted in them. The thing is that i want better midbass and something tells me i easily could achieve this with some kind of reinforcement of the kickpanel. What would be the best way of doing this without any bigger modifications? I am thinking about some butyl mat mounted on the backside of the panel, would this do it?

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durwood

hit it with a layer or two of fiberglass behind it. Then throw some dampening mat on it.

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RedGTiVR6

Your best bet is to actually BUILD an enclosure for your kicks. Just cutting a hole in the plastic kick pannel is honnestly taking the cheap, short, lazy way out.

No matter what you do to those pannels, if you don't build an actual enclosure you will probably never be happy.

Add much weight to those and there will be problems getting them to sit right in your kick for starters.

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durwood

That is a better approach to take. Q-forms are a similar plastic enclosure to what you have already and yield mediocre results if you don't need any bass output, but a solid kickpanel is much better.

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Jakosu

Okey, i've now tried to reinforce the plastic kickpanels with dynamat extreme and right away i noticed a very big diffrence in midbass response. But now you've guys have led me into thinking about making a custom kickpanel from fibreglass, i just hope that it's worth all the effort.

DarquePervert

Dynamat is sound deadening, not a reinforcing material.

If you're going to reinforce your kicks, you need something rigid, like cured fiberglass or MDF or some material that won't flex.
Dynamat is flexible.

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Jakosu

i forgot to mention that i did also hit it with 2 layers of fibreglass to make it rigid

DarquePervert

OK.

So after adding the fiberglass, is the mounting for the speaker more reigid/less flexible? That's what you're trying to achieve.

If you simply "add a couple layers of fiberglass", it may not be sufficient to make the speaker mounting rigid enough for noticible results.

Frankly, this is a ghetto-ish half-assed way. I think you're not really going to be happy unless you invest the time, effort and some cash into making all new kickpanels that are going to have better properties for housing your speakers, including rigidity, proper airspace, etc.

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Jakosu

Yeah, i am going to fabricate proper panels, this was just a temporary "solution". The result of the 2 layers of fibreglass and dampening was noticable and it did sound better , but as you say, a proper kick will of course sound better than this.

keep in mind that im a blonde swede, can't always do everything right all the time :P

durwood

haha. I won't even begin to go into the "ghetto fabulous installs" of my early days when I wanted to test things.

If they are for test mounting I don't see anything wrong with that. I hate to spend hours working on something to only find out it doesn't work and have to scrap the whole idea. But once you like the results of your testing, go with something more permanent. Were there stock speakers in your kicks in your BMW originally? I recall some having 4" or 5.25" down there.

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Jakosu

Heh, yeah, we all have our ghetto period i guess

There were some crappy stock 4" speakers in the kicks, the quality of them were very bad, it feels like they are made of printer paper and wallpaper glue

DarquePervert

Hey, I'm no stranger to ghetto-fabulousness, either. Look at my worklog when my PC was running off an inverter w/ a 15" screen on the floorboard.

Hell, I still don't have a "proper" screen!

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