Last month, we began the first half of a two-part article on the construction of the custom door panels in my Civic Si. This month, we'll continue and take a look at the concept car creations on the lower part of the panels, as well as the 3-D tweeter rails at the top.
The idea for placing custom car images in the bottom of the door panels came to me when I was trying to come up with a way to place the speakers on the door in a way that hadn't been done before. Many people don't even notice this little piece of artwork in the door panel but if you look closely, you can see a futuristic image of a concept car. (As a side note: This car design is actually my current car build project, so this is the teaser of what's to come.)
Last month, we left off with the insertion of the MDF rings in the Plaster of Paris door panel molds for the speaker placement. The holes were cut into the door panel to allow the speakers to be mounted at the front and rear, and for integration scoring at some of the shows (e.g. Trifecta). I decided to design the speaker locations to be the wheels of the concept car image on the door panel. To create this illusion, I made the bodies of the cars separate pieces of fiberglass. They weren't molded into the existing panel molds. This technique allows the car bodies to surface-mount onto the panels, allowing more shape so the concept cars' appearance is more believable. If they were molded into the panels, the shapes of the car bodies would've been lost.
Tweeter placement was another consideration in my design. A lot of thought went into it before I started the door panel. I didn't want to integrate the tweeters into the body of the concept car illusion, because it would've distracted from the believability of that image. I also didn't want to just mount the tweeters in the sail panels by the side-view mirrors, because that placement would only allow one tweeter and it has been done countless times before. So I chose to create another part of the door panels to tastefully display and mount the tweeters.
My midbass component speakers at the base of the door were mounted considerably off-axis from the listener. Mounting speakers' off-axis from your listening position does come at a price. The higher the frequency, the more directional they become so the upper spectrum of the midrange will tend to roll-off prematurely. To compensate for the desired off-axis speaker mounting location, I decided to mount the tweeter in a position that would be on-axis to each listener to limit losses in the high-frequency response and improve the efficiency of the front soundstage.
Next month, we'll finish up the Civic Si build and take a look at how we made the specialized effects in the paint on the hood of the car. Until then, if you have questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me at info@jasonsyner.com.