Installer Institute Articles

Box building can be a profitable part of any installation. Knowing how to sell it and being able to build it quickly will demonstrate your skills and knowledge as a certified installer. These are the steps used to build a subwoofer enclosure for a specific vehicle that is tuned to a specific frequency.

It is amazing the difference between a factory head lamp and an aftermarket HID head lamp, especially when you are working with quality equipment. In this article we will be going over the installation of two HID lighting kits from Xenonworkx, one for low beam and one for high beam in our 2005 Honda Civic.

Most of us have a lot of experiences with good old Johnny Law and speeding tickets. There is only a hand full of people that I personally know that can cry, beg and lie there way out of almost any type of ticket, including speeding tickets. Unfortunately for me, even though I try, I am not one of those people.  So after my last ticket ($220.00) I decided to invest in a solution that might not stop all my tickets but could help stop a large portion of them. After doing a little research on Florida law and looking into a few different products I decided to install a Laser Jamming system on to my 2007 Nissan Frontier, I was looking for something that would not hang from my windshield or go crazy when I drive by a store or shopping mall, so I purchased a hide-away unit that would integrate well into the vehicle.

With the increase in popularity or the comeback of SPL competitions in the past few years there has been an increase of theories as to what works and what won’t work to increase your SPL.  As an instructor I am asked a lot of questions regarding SPL applications and sound quality questions everything from, what type of product to use to what do I think is the best type of box to build, or what are the best speakers to use, and sometimes even what are the best type of cars should be used to compete with.  Being a novice competitor which most of SPL competitors are, it can be very confusing, hard to understand even frustrating. And taking the advice of experts that you have spoke to, you just went out and bought ten of the biggest gnarly speakers that they suggest.  And according to these experts you’ve spoke to they say, “there’s no way you can loose with these speakers”.  And after getting spanked at your first competition, and talking to other competitors they’re asking you why are you using those subs, why did you buy so many of them, and why in the heck did you build a box like that. Even worse, come to find out competitors in the in the two speaker class, are blowing your SPL scores out the door. 

Quite often when working with acrylic and ABS sheet plastics, it is desirable or beneficial to be able to make clean, accurate bends. Examples would be making custom radio side brackets, satellite radio or Ipod mounts, or plexiglass covers and trims for amps, batteries and fuse holders. While commercial solutions exist, they can be expensive, may not be particularly accurate and can take time to warm up. This project can be duplicated with parts that are already lying around your shop, or that can be obtained inexpensively at your local hardware store.

The Mitsubishi Evolution VIII we dubbed Crazy 8 back in our July 2006 issue features plenty of custom work and we’re bringing you all these tech pieces to prove it. This marks the sixth installment and we’ve still got more to come. Here, the Installer Institute guys tackle custom subwoofer enclosures in the trunk. We’ll let them guide you through what they know best. The sub enclosures are the most important part of the install because they will determine the location of everything else being installed into the trunk. For this part of the install we had some pretty big obstacles to overcome, including the Cusco strut bar that stretches across the back of the seat.

Greatly underused material in car audio fabrication, sheetmetal is probably one of the best materials to create OEM quality brackets and mounts. In a recent installation, I was presented with a high-end car needing a remote-mounted radar detector. The goal was a stealthy install with no permanent modifications to the vehicle. In this type of installation, the radar receiver is mounted behind the grille or front bumper fascia. Unfortunately, this particular car offered no location that was optimum for stealth, proper signal reception and mounting depth. I came up with an innovative solution by using the properties of sheet metal.

In this article we will be going over the steps to replace the factory leather seats with Katzkin Leather Products in our 2007 Cadillac Escalade. The Installer Institute staff was commissioned to build this Escalade for CES 2009 to display a new line of product from the UK called VIBE. Look for the feature within the next few months.

For a few years now it has been a trend for subwoofer manufactures to create huge monster subwoofer that require a crazy amount of power and can take up your entire trunk. I guess those of us that don’t have trunks are out of luck that is unless we remove one of our rear seats and drop in a square MDF box. Well I don’t know about you guys but that is not an option for me so I was glad that manufactures heard our cries and recreated a quality shallow mount woofer. In this article we will be taking you though a step by step of building an enclosure for a 2007 Nissan Frontier 4 door truck. This enclosure will be constructed completely out of fiberglass no wood was used in the final product. This build took a total of 10 hours and a material cost of $65.00.

Every so often we have to travel back to the basics of installations to welcome and satisfy the new readers of PAS magazine. So over the next few articles we will be covering the basics of day to day mobile electronics installations. In this article we will be starting with the installation of a headunit. A headunit is one of the most important parts of any system; if you have a cheap headunit you have a cheap sounding system. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw into the rest of the system it will only be a good as the source (Head Unit). During this article we will be installing a headunit into a 2005 Civic Coupe. The H.U. we will be a Kenwood double din touch screen that has been moved from vehicle to vehicle over that last 2 years.

Installer Institute graduate Gio Mazzurco build the dash of his 96 Deville during the 7th week of class and painted it during the 8th week. He did all the modifications himself.

In this article we will be creating an amp rack for a 2005 Honda Civic. In the Spring Break Nationals program back in March we show you how to create the enclosures using the factory formed truck liners and installed 2 Tsunami 12 woofers in to the rear quarter panels of the Civic. Well it is finally time to finish the install.