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If anyone's interested, I picked up some cheap bits of leather offcut in three colours y'day, as well as some very stiff cardboard (2mm thick), plus some glue, and, after careful measurement (perhaps not quite careful enough) and a failed first attempt when I cut the leather too small to really wrap around, I made this this morning.
The leather colour is actually a pretty good match for the Jaguar Doeskin colour. I'm not sure if I'll go with this or make another one in black (dark brown didn't work).
(I also ordered Gliptone's Export Leather Care Pack, which came with that leather scenter. Smells not entirely unlike leather ("soggy cardboard" might be closer), so I hope the actual conditioner is better. I've also left the leather scraps on the dash in the sun, as they actually smell like real leather....)
Anyway, it's not quite perfect - I managed to wrinkle the top left corner by pushing too hard to wedge it in, and it could be half a millimetre wider on the right edge, but as a sort of proof of concept, I'm satisfied.
I was originally hoping to veneer it, but I cannot track down any burl walnut veneer for sale in this country, and it would require rather more work, what with getting the veneer perfectly flat and then sanding and varnishing and all that. But I think it's better than plain old painted.
Am pretty sure I need new front speakers - the left one is particular can get pretty buzzy....
Final update, if anyone's interested.
First, I replaced the beige with black, which works better, and then I had to replace the front speakers, which I did today.
Getting the door panel off was fairly easy, thanks to advice here, elsewhere, and in my ROM. Even easing the chrome bit back wasn't that hard, after getting it popped off the metal bit with a large flat-bladed screwdriver and a leather scrap for protection. Unpop the plastic poppets, and pull up and maybe a bit to the rear, and off she comes. Ugh, that's mucky inside. Full of bits of added black tape.
Getting the old speaker out was even easier, and it was immediately obvious why it wasn't sounding quite perfect: almost all the cone support had crumbled away.
Left front speaker:
Right front speaker:
Acoustically transparent, definitely....
I was actually wondering if I should buy foam baffles for the speakers, but on removing the speakers, it was clear that they came with one - the sound-deadening (?) panel that covers the entire door is also a built-in top-half baffle to keep water out. Getting the new speakers in was not as easy as I hoped. I bought Alpine X-160C speakers, not wanting to bother with separate tweeters. These came with small boxes called "networks" however, and I had to find somewhere to put them. The instructions said to use the supplied ties to attach them to the door metal. That was not going to work in my case. However, at the top of the door near the hinge, where all the black tape is (or the white patch in the next photo), is a small pocket in the foam that houses an electrical connector. Just enough room to slip the network in there and trail the wires down inside to the speaker.
The next problem was that while the speaker diameter was identical, the screw hole locations were not quite identical. I ended up using 2.5 screws to hold it in rather than 3. But thanks to the foam, I think, it really did get in there, and I couldn't budge it by hand, so it should be all right. We'll see.
The door grill hides the speakers nicely, though you can just make out the gold ring.
Anyway, once that was all done, I took her for a short two-hour drive to test the speakers. Even a non-audiophile like me, who rated the old rotten ones as "can live with this," was able to tell it was a dramatic improvement. The car stereo actually sounds good now, which is pretty much a first for me as regards car stereos....
Here's some short snippets of different music so you can hear the difference. The sound was all recorded today, though some of the video is different as shots of traffic lights are not interesting. I think the quality is pretty good overall, with a very good sense of filling the car with sound, no overt tinniness, and even at times some interesting spatial effects - at one stage I thought I was hearing some strange sounds from the car, down around by the transmission tunnel, but they were actually part of the music.
(Apparently some copyright holder bot has filed a bot-claim, which I have disputed as it's clearly fair use to put in a twenty-second or so clip as part of a general example of speaker sound. Very few countries will play it at this point, so it's unlikely you can see anything here (or hear anything).)
Oh good, people can hear it.
At any rate, this was a pretty minor operation compared to what some have done (things like bleeding the brakes scare me), but saved me probably the the equivalent of a couple of hundred dollars/pounds/euro in labour.
04-20-2017, 09:08 PM
