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Famous story about Jack Johnson the great heavyweight boxer from the early 1900s. Once, when he was pulled over for a $50 speeding ticket, he gave the officer a $100 bill; when the officer protested that he couldn't make change for that much, Johnson told him to keep the change as he was going to make his return trip at the same speed.
Participated in the Local Revenue Generation Program - Speeding Ticket written up for 30 in a 25 = $35.00 fine but after all the fees it totals $165.00. I said "Next time just ask I'll simply write a check to the PD".
Take a look at European tickets... They are usually $200-$600 for the same reason
Any other compelling thoughts or observations to make in this thread or all the others you've blessed with your 1 or 2 word responses? Time to gin up more business for over priced plastic bits again huh?
Ok, good to hear. I've read horror stories here and elsewhere about this swap. Just curious though, was looking at my cluster today and scratched my head trying to figure out how you get to the gauge cluster without taking the dash apart?
you have to remove the shroud behind steering wheel and you will see 2 screws. Take those out. Then pull like hell
We would like to have all the time of the world to participate more, sometimes we are just so busy attending customers.
HAHAHAHA. Hilarious!
I contacted your company on 31 March to seek your help with what I consider to be a defective product, perhaps the result of a manufacturing issue. I sent a polite, detailed message with pictures and a request for help. I respected your many previous claims of "very busy serving customers" and waited patiently to hear from you. You had an opportunity to turn me into a raving fan, but instead you have yet to respond to me in any way.
That is **** poor business, so I will steer potential customers away from you because of your sales and customer support practices. Or lack thereof.
Installed engine mounts on my 2008 C2 Convertible with 69k miles. Bought them from eEuroparts.com. Site showed them as O.E.M. Brand, which I misread/mis-understood to be an OEM manufacturer. I was prepared to return but they arrived in a couple days and looked of good quality. Boxes showed “Made In Czech Republic”, which if to be believed made me feel a bit better. They looked identical to the ones I took off.
Performed the 3M Windo Weld mod as demonstrated by Car Fanatic / dc2000 (thanks CF). Installation was uneventful. Cleaned out the throttle body while I had the air box off. My old mounts had sagged the roughly 3/8 inch or so as others have reported. Bought new top bolts (M8 x 40, flange head, grade 10.9, 1.25 thread) at locale hardware store for $1.75 each.
Mod brought my exhaust tips up nicely. It did add some (acceptable) vibration at idle to my car seat but, surprisingly, none to the steering wheel or shift **** or anything else. I didn’t notice any additional NVH while driving but then I’m driving a 15 year-old convertible with the top down and a Gundo-hacked muffler…. Shifting improved noticeably. The sometimes notchy 1st gear smoothed out. All gears shifted more tightly and smoothly. Very nice results for not much money or time. Will be quick to do again in 50,000 miles or so.
Those look exactly like mine did. It sort of made the non-sport driving like driving in sport now. Such a difference. I spent a bit of time aligning the Fabspeed tips. Whomever put them on wasn't paying attention to detail.
swapped the BOSE amp out for a 8-channel with DSP. and started tuning. new speakers will be next up. Truly a budget setup, none of this top-of-the-line Focal speaker "budget" crap.
The JBL DSP4086; 8 Channel amp with a built in DSP.
Incredibly easy to install. I simply had to run an RCA up to it and then everything else was already at the AMP connector, since it's a DSP you can get away with just running a single pair of RCAs from the front channel if you prefer. I ran my remote power wire through the factory red/white "wake-up" wire at the HU. The amp connector was $40 on eBay, but surprisingly very high quality.
The size is absolutely perfect. it fits right into the factory location -- I even used the mounting clips to slot it into. It's just a little short, so I'm going to make an extension to the flange so I can use the factory clip to hold it in place.
My biggest complaint with the BOSE setup was the poor way they crossover the tweeters. A simple 4.7uF cap First Order crossover on them is not enough (This also suggests the tweeters are 4ohm and that would cross them over at 8500Hz). So when I would turn my volume up, I could hear them pop & distort as they were playing frequencies way too low for a tweeter. My HU has a decent EQ on it, and if I would bump even the 50Hz range it would directly affect the volume at which the tweeters would start failing and popping. This suggests the factory amp doesn't have enough juice to power both the 3" speaker and the tweeter on a single channel, since it takes way more energy to play lower frequencies.
As a result, I never felt the system has enough mid-low range and I would crossover my subwoofer a bit high to fill in.
Here's an initial sweep of my setup. Pioneer HU, 8" subwoofer, and factory bose amp/speakers:
Lots of peaks and valleys. A huge cancelation at 70Hz and missing a lot of the low-end like I suspected.
The JBL software is really easy to use, and honestly it's really powerful at 31-filters per channel. I have two small complaints: 1. you cannot change the crossover algorithm, just the db/octane rate. 2. the Q parameter maxes at 9 so you can't do incredibly fine adjustments. Very very small complaints. The reduction of complexity alone is worth it. I had previously installed a Dayton DSP-408 and two small 4-channel amps which was a PITA and a mess behind the scenes.
This unit is notorious for ground loop interference, and after spending the effort putting it all together was a victim and I couldn't remove it to my satisfaction. I wish I bought the JBL in the first place.
Anyway.
This amp needs tuning. You cannot just install this amp and be on your way. It absolutely requires you to connect with your laptop and--in the least--setup your mixer input and channels and crossovers. Right off the bat, I felt like this amp brightened the sound significantly, but needed a lot of work.
Pretty nasty curve in red was just after the install and setting up crossovers. The green line was some initial tuning.
Screenshot above shows the response curve of the L and R 8" woofers after tuning, and how closely I got them to match side to side. I don't seem to have a before screen shot to show you how awful they looked before, but there were HUGE spikes and valleys and cancelations.
and finally he's where I ended up after the weekend. You can see I have a lot more low-end drastic difference between 60Hz and 300Hz and a really flat response from 1K to 20K. For car audio, I like to start raising the dB level linearly at 1K to my subwoofer peak otherwise I think it sounds way too flat and missing way too much mid/bass. I've seen others suggest starting at 200Hz and I personally think it sounds terrible.
I could probably fine-tune this even more, but I'm pretty happy with the results so far. This was just phase 1, I do plan on replacing all the speakers -- especially the 8" door woofers as they really seem to perform miserably when I would measure them. They doors also need some major sound deadening, the rattle like crazy and I need to take the inner door panel off to really cure it.
The mids and tweeters honestly didn't need a lot of effort tuning to get them flat -- same with the rears. But I want to at least get the tweeters on their own channel so I can separate them from the mids and tune them individually.
Here's my subwoofer enclosure I built if you're curious. Kicker Comp-R 8" I had from my last vehicle powered by an $100 power acoustik amp which is dyno proven to provide a solid 650watt at 2 ohm:
^ Black Magic!! You’re the kind of person I’d try to drop off my car with to have it done. “Just tell me what to buy and when I can come by to let watch you install it.”
09-22-2022, 12:33 PM
They are usually $200-$600 for the same reason
