Andy Warhol came close with his declaration that everyone, in his or her lifetime, would get 15 minutes in the celebrity sun. If TV and tabloids are accurate indicators, certainly any schmuck is capable of an audience under the bright lights - it just may last a little longer than Warhol could have imagined.
Thus we have the Cult of Celebrity Installer, a trend sparked and stoked by shows like Pimp My Ride and Unique Whips, and magazines like the one spanned across your fingers. So we're always impressed when we meet an installer who expends great effort to cover his tracks and make himself invisible to all but the most discriminate and trained eye.
Meet Matt Turner and Randy Lively, two custom installers tapped to build a project Dodge Charger SRT-8 for CA&E and David Wheels' David Fowlkes. Fowlkes, president of Davin Wheels, asked only this: Give me good 5.1, keep as much of the trunk as possible, and make it look like Dodge did the work. "I like it when you get in the car and see everything, but start to notice the details afterward," Fowlkes says. "It's not so in-your-face. Those doors - you'd swear to God those are factory until you start to look at them."
Fowlkes chose his craftsmen well. Both men made their bones at Hi-Fi Buys in Atlanta's tony Buckhead area, where routine jobs involved custom, stealth systems in Porsche and Mercedes S-class models. The irony is that both Turner and Lively used the Charger to descend back under the radar. If you saw the Chrysler 300M that ran in CA&E a few issues back, you know that these guys have nothing to prove to anybody anymore.
The first order of surgery called for mounting the double-DIN Eclipse source unit flush in the dash console. "It's not that I don't like flip-outs, but they don't look factory," Fowlkes says. "I wanted that integrated look, like it was meant to be there."
The solution: disengage the flip-out motor and push the monitor back on its tracks about a half inch, and then fab up some brackets to keep the touchscreen from wobbling when pressed. A 1/2" piece of silver-painted acrylic surrounds the new head unit assembly, which also required moving the climate controls south 3/8" and relocating switches for traction control and hazard lights forward of the armrest.
Turning their attention to the system's 5.1 demands, Turner and Lively found placing the 2" center channel speaker more of a challenge than expected. A small patch of plastic under the forward section of the dash ruled out a recessed center channel and tweeter install. Faking it was out of the question.