The Ed Unit Reminisces

From 2.5 to 14 kilowatts, Martyn Williams is still on an idiotic mission of sound-car construction from possibly the first centre-steered car back in the 90s, to the first V6-engined Corsa and beyond into 24 subwoofer mayhemIt’s hard to imagine, but driving down to the pub at the turn of the last century would usually involve setting fire to something under the bonnet before your single cylinder engine burst into life. And even in the 1950s it was normal to have your car serviced every 3000 miles.
I mention this only to get you used to the idea of how unsophisticated the early days of motoring used to be. Even worse though, a mere 30-odd years ago, was the early days of car audio.
Despite the first line-fit radio being installed in the early 1930s in America, it was less than 40 years ago that car audio in the UK as we know it, was only just moving away from the age of valves. The mobile media choice then was between a stereo tape cartridge variously called ‘Stereo 8’ or ‘Lear Jet cartridge,’ or a compact cassette player using Philips’ dictation machine media devised in the early 60s. If you wanted a radio in the very early tape-playing days, this was normally bought as a separate unit. All of them had teeny-weeny power outputs, typically, two and a half watts. Yes, 2.5 frikkin’ watts! Even worse, cheap radios often had a single channel with 1.5 watts on tap.
In the early 1970s when I was a mere boy with my first Mini, I managed to find a cassette tuner head unit made in Italy where they had fiendishly strapped two amplifiers in tandem on each channel.
It sounded **** and distorted about halfway up the volume control but it had FIVE whole watts per channel. Nobody in my area of the London suburbs had a clue that reasonably powerful external amplifiers were being built in the States at this time, or that there were custom built speakers available. If the internet had existed, we would have bankrupted ourselves to buy it.
My foray into car sounds when dinosaurs still ruled the earth, was a domestic speaker set ordered up as a kit which was supposed to be built into two big cabinets. The woofers, such as they were, went into the back shelf, and the mids and tweeters into the doors nobody on the block had ever seen or heard anything like it.
The speakers were powered by a butchered mains amplifier with a pulsating 30 watts per channel. The AC-powered supply side had been ripped out and the working part of the amp was supplied with four small 12 volt batteries (designed for portable heart monitors!) in series giving the required 48 volts. The music didn’t last for long because they had to be disconnected and separately charged for a couple of hours before joining them up again. This usually involved a lot of sparks and, on two occasions, a small fire. It had a modicum of genuine bass and was louder and clearer than anything we had ever heard in a car park.
Apart from what we  used to get up to on a Saturday night after picking up women in the pub, it was definitely the most freakish thing to happen in a car between Wandsworth and the Surrey border. Several semi-geeky mates were soon installing similar loud, but inconvenient sound systems, and it helped no end to make them stand out from the crowd during local motoring bull**** sessions. It was also found to be a female attractant very important when you are nineteen.
As time went on, tape gave way to disc offering an instant upgrade to more dynamic sound. The first CD deck fitted in my car, a Pioneer in 1983, barely outperformed my Nakamichi tape machine. Disc players soon developed over the next couple of years and the dynamic divide between tape and disc was clearly cut. It was also helped, I suspect, by slightly higher pre-out voltages.
Lots of installs later, it seemed about time to attempt something really bonkers. I wanted to do a mad Fiat 500 but they were far too dear. A compromise arrived in the form of a surprisingly rust-free Fiat 126 for £250. The whole interior was gutted and the tatty full length sliding vinyl roof was replaced with a 6mm clear acrylic panel it shook like the devil when the volume was turned up it must have absorbed a lot of power. The rear windows were blacked out and a thick wooden partition with some 4×2 inch reinforcing struts was bolted in level with the B posts. Several duvets-worth of fibrous wadding was rammed into the back and a 26 inch Magnat Aggressor 6000 subwoofer was screwed into place the sealed 25 cubic foot sealed enclosure was just right for good performance
The clutch and brake pedal box was removed and cut and welded with the pedals angled to the left. Luckily the box was mounted quite near to the centre so it was easy to change them over. The accelerator pedal stayed on the right the cabin is so narrow that there was only about a 12 inch gap between it and the brake. The other stage of the job was to drill new holes for the steering wheel bracket moving the steering wheel to the middle of the dash, with its double-jointed column, took less than an hour. Amplifiers were mounted on a panel under the bonnet and full range and mid-bass speakers were arranged either side of the dash for a perfect stereo image for the driver sitting in the middle of the car.
Strangely, the only time the car was measured at a show for SPL, the battery was down to less than 10 volts. It still managed a creditable 149.9 dBA we were annoyed that we couldn’t quite make that point one!
 
In Praise Of Novas
Along with the sound cars there was a bunch of silly-quick cars being built, mainly Vauxhalls. It all started with an old Nova I blame it on GM building the whole range like Lego you could bolt on Cavalier front brakes and wheels in less than an hour and be able to smell the grass on the roundabouts before you start using the anchors. It’s a great feeling to have discs big enough to slow down a largish car fitted to a small tin box like the Nova. With a decent set of 195/50 tyres the braking was more impressive than the acceleration.
A standard two litre XE engine from an Astra GTE supplied the Nova with a grunty power just a shade under 160bhp. The XE engine is unusual for a high performance engine for having plenty of low speed pulling power. Taking advantage of the Nova’s lightness, flooring the accelerator at 1000rpm in third gear would produce a twittering sound from the tyres as it wanted, but couldn’t, spin the wheels. It was interesting to cruise (on the Autobahn!) at around 100mph alongside mate’s standard hot hatches flooring the gas pedal at the same time would see the Nova pull away while the other car seemed to almost stand still.
Times have changed now that manufacturers have stiffened body shells, perfected suspension and drive shaft geometry and, most important of all, introduced traction and anti-yaw electronics allowing 200-plus bhp to be commonplace and easily harnessed by inexperienced drivers.
The Nova three door has fantastic doors for filling with speakers it will take a modest-depth flush-mount 12 inch sub underneath the quarterlight glass section! The flush mounting depth is about 100mm along the lateral centre line of the door. It was great for speaker testing. Plywood blanks were made with identical mounting holes and the doors had Dzus quick-action fastener clips. Speakers could be changed in less than a minute.
The Nova was beginning to feel slow (it would only do about 140 down hill with the wind behind it) and was going a bit rusty at the edges. Definitely the worst thing about it was the wind noise. One trip in the new kid on the block, the Corsa, was enough to convince me that this was the luxurious, comparatively noise-free, future.
Obviously I like small hatches but an explanation about the preoccupation with Vauxhalls is all down to having a friend, Colin, who owns a salvage company that only breaks GM products and also down to being particularly friendly with Vauxhall’s Public Relations department. During a conversation with said PR dept., the conversation turned to suitable power plants for the Corsa I now owned how about a two and a half litre V6. Would it fit? ‘We’ve got a spare one lying about in the training school if you want to try it,’ came the reply
(And I thought I was a good swag-meisterAdam)

In the same day that we picked up the V6, it was fitted with an Astra GSi flywheel (easily half the weight of the original) and gearbox and was dropped into the empty engine bay of Colin’s donor car lying around in his yard. Only slight changes to some Cavalier engine mounts were needed to make it fit. Even though we were the first to prove it could be done, the whole lot was finally turned over to a mad, Ferrari-owning engineer called Sean Blencoe who did some amazing things like fitting a custom fuel injection system which boosted the power to around 200bhp (he went on to fit one into Honda’s tiny Civic sports car). The Corsa would easily pass the 150mph barrier and the smooth V6 made it a pussycat to drive.
The car is now owned by a guy who has a Porsche and a Ferrari in his garage but he still loves to drive his stealth monster, now about 13 years old. It still makes me laugh to read go-faster car magazines about other V6 Corsas that have been built since. Only a couple of years back I saw an article about yet another one with a quote along the lines of ‘it’s never been done before.’
The V6 had a big sound system but wasn’t anything special. It used Clarion’s flagship disc changer which uses three six disc magazines 18 CDs in all. It was regarded as massive in its day but all sounds rather quaint in the era of the iPod etcetera.As you can imagine, a changer with 18 discs was quite large. I once went to a sales conference where the drinks had already been flowing and a couple of dealers one pretending to be the customer – were asked to create a typical selling scenario in front of large crowd of ICE industry personnel. The dealer introduced the changer to the customer as the ‘maisonette’ model, which seemed to strike a particularly hilarious note with the audience leading to aching stomachs and tears running from the eyes for about five minutes before order was restored. It was one of those moments where you had to be there.
 
The Making Of A Blingster
My next car was also a Corsa but this time with a more sensible chipped 230-odd bhp Calibra Turbo 6sp wedged under the bonnet a much easier install than the V6. It had a complete Calibra GSi ABS braking system and Bilstein Sport suspension to cope with all the torque and heavy braking pressure. Happily the shocks were the ones with the extra large diameter piston rods.
As the old saying of ‘Drive Fast, Get Nicked’ goes, it wasn’t long before this near-160mph beastie had collected me six points with another three on the way. It was so tempting to break the hearts of drivers with Porsches and other exotica when you pulled away from them with a standard-looking Corsa (apart from fatter tyres) with a 1.2L badge on the back. Even though the exhaust was 2.5 inches throughout the length of the car, it exited through a fairly puny matching-size tailpipe, so there wasn’t even a big ‘zorst to give it away.
All that was to change when it was put up for sale to prevent my licence being pointed off the planet. It was bought by JVC PR man Carl Hynes who asked me to turn it into a show-stopper in 84 days ready for the 2003 Max Power London Show at the Excel Centre.
My main job as a journalist had been writing about other people’s sound demo cars but I had never built one myself.The install would have never been possible without a fantastic team of guys: Roly ‘Basshead’ Knight  (kitchen fitter) Colin ‘Nobby’ Norris (nobody knows!) and brother Noz Norris (engineering designer) all of them total amateurs who had not even thought about building a sound system until they saw me struggling with bits of wood and fibreglass. Their verdict on my efforts? I would finish the job some time in the year 2010
Just by pure luck it turned out that apart from our main interests of playing pool, eating curry and drinking lager we were a perfectly interlocking team. Roly was the ‘get things done’ man. When everybody is running around like headless chickens he starts strutting around in the shed barking orders and making us decide what direction we are going in. Nobby is the engineer. If we want something to fit exactly into place after it’s been made, he is the man for the job. Noz turned out to have the artistic interpretation of what we were trying to do and is definitely the most adventurous fibreglass shaper. I was officially designated the Man with a Plan and the ordering clerk for all the bits and pieces required for the install.
Our inaugural meeting was blessed by attendance of JVC’s Mr Hynes for an evening of revelry at the pub. In celebration of the linking of the names Williams, Norris And Knight, he came up with a neat T shirt with FCUK-style typeface – Team WNAK was born.
Because time was short, the car was divided roughly into three separate jobs. I had a go at designing the car and building a full glass fibre dash. The door builds, also in GRP, were handled by Gary Wollen who, at the time, owned In Car Systems in Frimley, Surrey. Gary now works in the domestic AV industry with his own company, Lounge Lizards, specialising in multi-room custom installations. The nine-sub bass box build in the back and numerous other jobs were handled by Nobby, Basshead’ and Dave ‘Scratcher’ Greening.
The Corsa was fitted with a Combat body kit supplied by PSG and the whole lot was sprayed by a guy called Mark Lee (01353 775019) who is one of the few people you can find who won’t charge the National Debt for spraying a body-kitted car. One of the reasons for sprayers charging a lot of cash is that the fit and finish of body kits can range from ‘hmmm,’ to a pile of ****. Luckily the PSG stuff is more in the hmmm area.
The paint we chose for the two-tone look was an Italian theme with Fiat metallic Charcoal lower half with Ferrari Prugna metallic red upper half. The red contains eight base colours including blue/black, organic maroon, transparent red and silver. In full sunlight it looks pink. Indoor lighting can make it look anything from a plum colour to brown. Weird or wot? 

Heart Of Glass
Creating a totally mad dash was simple. I cheated. The original plastic dash in the Corsa was carved out leaving about a 30mm margin around the edges to preserve the bolts/holes to keep the outer shape so it could be easily fitted and removed. The heater and other stuff not needed for a pure show car was chucked out and an MDF framework for the speakers, screens and head units was constructed. Stretchy grille cloth material was pulled over the whole lot to achieve a shape and it was painted with resin. Once it had set, the dash was unbolted and reinforced with glass fibre matting on the inside. When it was being smoothed with filler on the outside and rubbed down, it fell off the bench a few times. The only damage was to the floor, so we reckoned it was quite strong.
More cheating was done making the steering column. It was formed from a polythene wet-wipes bottle.
Gary constructed the doors in a similar way to the dash using the original trim edges as a framework to build on. Gary decided there would be too much weight carrying the full range speakers on the door moulding so the speakers along with the subs were mounted in the doors and the grilles for the 6 inch and 6x9s were moulded into the door trim. The weight of the door with an amp and two subs was tested on the hinges by tying all the components onto the door to make sure the hinges would take it. So far, nothing has sagged but there were no thoughts of risking a scissor door hinge conversion
The rear bass enclosure module consisted of three sealed bass boxes of nearly five cubic feet each plus lots of the panelling and mirrors facing down at an angle above the subs. The mirrors tend to give the appearance of having 15 instead of nine subs in the back. The most impressive thing was that the JVC subs had translucent cones which lit up blue in the middle, pulsating to the bass beat.
The Corsa was filled up with JVC equipment which included (if you ever wanted to know..) a KD-SH9101 CD tuner, KD-DV5000 DVD tuner, JVC Mini notebook computer, 13 x CS-LD3250 10inch 400W subs, 6 x KS-AX6500 4 x 100w RMS amps , 4 x CS-XV6930 6x9s, 6 x CS-XV620 6 inch full range speakers and 4 x KV-MH6500 6.5in monitor screens. The Corsa took about 400 man-hours, did loads of shows for a couple of years and we got loads of requests to ‘Build one for me just like it?’ Once we quoted 400 by a modest 25 quid, (plus materials) they usually went off the idea.
Best of all, it was LOUD. At the Max Power show we were told to turn it down the Health and Safety Bandits measured it at about 125dB at two metres and we weren’t trying. The best example of its loudness came up at a Weston Wheels show down in the West Country. A guy came over to look at the car after hearing it where we were parked at the edge of the enclosure quite a long way away from the main show area. At the time, he had been watching the girls on the Fuel Records stand. Anyone who knows how loud the Fuel PA system is played, will be able to guess how insanely noisy the JVC Corsa was.
So, we had become a sound demo-car-building team and despite, or because of, the fact that it was built in a shed at the bottom of my garden, we were asked to build another one this time using a Mitsubishi Colt Turbo.
The Colt was an equipment nutter with 24 subwoofers and 12 amplifiers but the general shape of the car has been preserved so the nice Mitsubishi people can still see what it is. As usual, the initial planning was done at the local curry house and on to the pub. Once the mist in our heads from the previous night had cleared and having made no decisions, we set about estimating how much JVC kit could be rammed into the relatively spacious back end of the Colt. ‘I reckon we could get at least 18 subwoofers in there,’ someone said. ‘Okay, let’s do it!’
After 14 litres of Cobra on another visit to the curry house, the next stage was to decide where to put a massive stack of amplifiers to run the subs. This spawned the idea of an ‘amplified passenger seat’ by Roly. We also decided that we could wedge three heavy ten inch subs into each door. I think that idea came to us working late in the shed dipping heavily into a crate of Stella.
It was first put together last year using JVC’s budget range of equipment. As we knew that the first build would only last one season, the rear setup was constructed mainly from 18mm medium density fibreboard. The final job mainly shown in the pictures is the permanent installation which goes a step further using loads of fibreglass. Nothing was easy from the start. The Colt is a lot wider than the Corsa we had previously built so preparation work started outside the car with widening the garage/shed by half a metre. Bearing in mind that we all have proper jobs, this took nearly a month out of the schedule before as much as lifting a spanner to the Mitsi.
Building a high power system needs great attention to detail on the wiring. Everything was stripped out of the car. Seats, carpet, door and side trim in preparation for laying some serious cabling. A quick calculation of the amplifier power we knew we’d be using meant that the power cables needed to cope with about 150 Amperes on full chat. The main supply to the amps uses two lengths of American Stinger ‘zero’ gauge wiring. The conductor is roughly the thickness of a little finger and is rated in excess of 200 Amperes over short distances. When it comes to power wiring, one of the errors I have seen inexperienced installers make, is to have heavy 12 volt positive cabling while almost ignoring the fact that the earth wires also need to be just as meaty. Cable of the size we were using needs an minimum of an 8mm earth bolt, ideally on the floor pan with serrated washer contact on bare metal treated with grease to stop corrosion. The chance of interference can be reduced by keeping the earth run of reasonably equal distances from the amplifiers and if possible, running all the earth wires to the same point.
If you get the DIY bug about doing your own installation using MDF and/or fibreglass, do bear in mind that both the dust and the fumes created when working with these materials are toxic. We splashed out £100 on a big dust extractor but the least you should be thinking about is a vacuum cleaner near the job when cutting or laying up glass matting. The matting itself should not be handled without gloves. The fave is the thin latex types which doesn’t impede the user’s ability to do detail work.
Unless you weren’t thinking of doing anything with the rest of your life, another essential piece of equipment needed for this sort of work is a proper breathing mask not one of those funny bits of paper on elastic but a professional fume mask. One of the best in the business is made by 3M it’s a 07192 ‘organic vapour /P95 assembly.’
The fibreglass modules used to house the speakers and other equipment are relatively easy to make. In fact, probably the trickiest thing about them is figuring out how to trim them into the vehicle if the sections are large enough not to be free-standing. The Colt has the added factor of having three massive moulded sub enclosures at the back which not only have to fit together neatly in exactly the right position but also have to be trimmed into the rubber surround around the hatch opening. The joints between the subwoofer modules were trimmed with special plastic T pieces. These are available from most trim shops in a variety of sizes.
With this sort of installation you end up fabricating a wooden base structure inside the car first, then adding the subwoofer mounting rings with the assembly outside the car, and then finishing off with the stretch fleece material inside the car again to mould it into the edges of the hatch opening. Probably the easiest job was the amp rack which is just a simple MDF frame glued and screwed together. The biggest headache in this area was hiding the mass of Stinger wiring required for the amplifiers. Also, because the amps are so close together, one mistake in the wiring could mean that half the amps needed to be pulled out to get at the cables. Closely-packed amps equals lots of heat, so the car’s blower motor was craftily configured with a separate supply and the ducting which normally goes to the rear seats was all directed onto the amplifier rack. If the car is shown outdoors the engine and air-conditioning can be run for extra cooling when we get anything which actually looks like a hot summer’s day.
Finishing off the car involved all the usual high and low pass tweaking, plus we found that seriously stuffing the smallish bass enclosures with absorbent material (Terylene wool from old duvets is best) makes a big difference to the tone of the bass. But we would never get a really good sound if the sound quality wasn’t engineered into the JVC product in the first place everywhere we went, loads of people comment on the loudness but more importantly they were blown away by the clarity.
We have found JVC stuff to be absolutely bullet-proof running the amps so hot all day that they could burn your fingers nothing has failed even though we are pumping the system hard. Sometimes on a hot summer’s day.
Rogues gallery Team WNAK identity parade
Colin ‘Nobby’ Norris
Don’t ask him why he is called Nobby, particularly if you are a woman. Colin is an eccentric millionaire and international man of mystery. Key member of the team when it comes to rubbing down a piece of MDF to one thousandth of a millimetre. Has a motorbike/car choice for every day of the week including an extremely yellow Griff 500.
James ‘Noz’ Norris
We don’t know where he lives and what exactly he does when sitting at his computer when he eventually turns up for work. He smokes 45 fags a day and yet plays football for the county. He has broken nearly every bone in his body (not all at once) in hang gliding, snow boarding, and shooting accidents and is irresistible to women.
Roland ‘Basshead’ Knight
He plays the stereo so loud in his car that he once killed a small dog just by opening his door. He can assemble an eleven-unit luxury kitchen in 9.5 seconds whilst drinking four pints of Stella. This fact pales into insignificance when compared with his prowess in other directions but this is better left unsaid
JVC COLT – THE LIST
Project Thruster install features 15 acres of fibreglass, several miles of excellent Stinger cable and accessories, Audio Control line-drivers, enough rolls of R-BLOX sound deadening material to carpet Hertfordshire, 165 man days, 25 Indian take-aways, 17 cases of Stella and the following JVC products 7 x KV-MH6510 screens; 18 x CS-DX25 10 inch subwoofers; 6 x CS-DX30 12 inch subwoofers; 13 x KS-AX5500 amplifiers; one pair CS-FX6902 6×9 speakers; 2 pairs CS-FX602 speakers; one KD-AVX1 head unit; one KD-AVX2 head unit; one x JVC 9 inch screen robbed from a roof mounting unit (KV-MR9010). Project Thruster produces in excess of 155dB of SQ-rated sound in open air at one metre with the aid of 11,500 Watts-worth of JVC amplifiers and was measured by EMMA by placing a microphone in the back connected to Audio Control measuring equipment at 172.1dB. Remember that these figures were attained with no SPL-style reinforcement.