First of all I don't claim to be an eggspert on this subject or anything else you've heard I've done to my car. I fancied some door pods to take a 17cm midrange speaker in my mk2 and I wasn't about to pay ?170 for audioscape ones.
As someone once said. "Dizzie ain't afraid to try something new". Now I'd never done fibreglass before, so had no idea how this was going to turn out. After talking with a few people, mainly my dad who worked in a bodyshop for most of his life and seeing a couple of articles on it I had the basic idea covered.
The kit I bought contained the FG sheets, resin, hardener, a brush, some gloves and a little pot to mix in. That lot cost the pocket money sum of ?5.99. Bargin. I also bought some more resin and FG sheets, just in case I needed more. The FG sheets come in 1 huge peice. It's a lot easier to cut that down into smaller strips that will be easier to work with. I didn't actually try putting 1 huge peice on as I was advised not to. Also mixing lots of smaller pots of resin and hardener works best as when I tried to mix more it had gone hard before I'd used all that was in the pot. Cover everything in sight! The door card was under several peices of paper that shaped the same as it so I could get a flush fit when moulding. This gets VERY messy from here on.
First of all I cut a MDF 'donut' the right size to sit my 17cm speaker into. (this was stolen from my last pods i made). I then removed enough of the original pocket to acomodate the magnet behind without having the cut the door card. The idea was to use the FG to create a nice smooth look working up to the MDF ring. I used a Glue gun to secure the donut to the pocket so it was easier to work on. I had to move the speaker up enough so the donut wasn't overlapping the bottom and allowed me to get a nice curve there too, but at the same time wasn't halfway up the door as that would require cutting of the actual card. Since I'd just managed to bag a set of uncut cards and cleaned them up to look like new I wasn't about to cut another hole! See pic.
After getting the position of the donut secured in place I started to apply the sheets of cut down FG absolutly caking them in resin. Not sure if that's the way it's done, but it worked for me. Building up in the corners to a nice curve. You don't have to get the curve absolutly spot on as we'll be covering it in filler ready to sand down to a smooth finish later on. you can always make up sections later. I found when doing the front and bottom if you could get 1 peice to stay on enough and dry it would go rock solid and give a wicked curve unlike the first attempts on the back section. It took about 3 1/2 pots to get it this far. I then put it outside to dry. The fumes are very bad so make sure you're in an open place.
Once it had dried it looked like the above pic. The FG had gone rock solid all around the donut so it was secured as good as it was going to be. Now even the small little bits that are sticking out are solid and require a fair bit to cut down. Next comes the filler. Last time I built some doorpods with only filler I used a whole pot to do each pod. I decided only to mix a little bit to start with. slightly smaller than the size of a fag packet with the right amount of hardener! I only just put the filler on before writting this so I'll take some more pics once that's dried. it's outside at the mo as it was stinking the whole garage out!
to be continued....
