# 2006 GTO SQ Build: Zapco, AP, Exodus, Image Dynamics



## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

So this is 3rd build on a personal car. Lets start with the basics. I bought a 2006 GTO. Heres all the gear I have amassed for this build with my moderate budget.

Pioneer 80PRS
2- Zapco Z150.4's
2- Audible Physics NZ3's
2- Exodus Anarchy 6.5's
4- Image Dynamics ID8 D4 subwoofers

We can stop there for a second because it was totaled rear suspension quarterpanel, quarterglass, and the back right wheel all dead. So first things first lets go to the body shop. First thing we did was put it on a lift and throw in rear suspension off of a 40k mile 06. 

With the new rear cradle swapped back into the car we could begin cutting away the metal. The above photo is stage one of cutting. 

Aaaaannnddd here is stage 2. Ready for metalwork

At this point I left my bodyman to do the rest. I have complete faith. 

Heres the finished product after driving 9 hours to kansas and 9 hours back to find the only guy seemingly in the world with a few of these wheels.


Gratuitous shots over lets start the build.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

We can start with the dash. The dash kits for the GTO on a single din look like crap and also don't match the interior very well so thats the issue I wanted to solve first. Step one make a template, so I cut out a piece of MDF and layed out how I wanted it to sit. I liked the idea of a credit card slot for my custom ipod classic. I decided I would allow one usb on the front as well as an AUX input. The left side would have a PAC LC1 volume knob.

Not enough photo's of this process but heres stage one of bodywork and bondo after I covered the panel in resin and made a pan for my ipod from fiberglass.

And heres the finished product on my table in the house

Sadly for whatever reason the paint cracked after =(. I ended up pulling this out a redoing it vowing to never use MDF as a base ever again. Its currently in the car so I'll have to snap a photo sometime. I'm probably going to mold in the Pioneer faceplate into the panel so I can make a seemless transition. But heres a photo after it decided to crack.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Now for the stuff I'm in the middle of working on I'm gonna have to knock this stuff out soon because next semester I'm not going to have time for a life. Much less this....

I had another totaled 2004 GTO i was parting out I could use to build my parts for my red one. This way I could continue driving my 06 daily without worrying about messing up my interior with fiberglass fumes and accidentally dropping it in places. Lets start with the subwoofer boxes.
I dismantled the interior and this is the quarter panel. 
Theres tons of space inside and from the factory theres nothing but a speaker running open and and some foam. So I needed to fix that.

I drilled out all of the rivets. I discovered on the passengers side that this car had been in nearly the same accident as my red one and had a red quarter and red door.

Next step two layers of tape on both quarterpanels. This is going to take a while as its freezing outside and only 65 degrees in the shop so the glass will take a while to flash.

My first time using US composites for glass instead of bondo brand. Pretty good experience though next time I'm buying acetone...

That 1980's hepa mask. Whatever works right?

Layer one complete. 

With two layers of glass onto the forms I pulled them and set out to reinforce the glass with the gallon of bondo resin I had lying around since I burned through most of my US composites stuff on the forms

Reinforced and cut to the proper fitment. They drop in perfect with just the right angle. These won't even need bolts to stay in place.

Made my marks on the MDF I had lying around.

I routed out the backside to allow for a place to put fiberglass reinforcement. Most likely kitty hair filler. Due to the odd shape I'll be pulling fleece and reinforcing the top part as to get the fitment I want.

Heres where the subs will be when its all said and done. I'll be modding the arm rests as well to allow better flow.

Here they have sat for a month due to college and work killing all of my time. I'm sure I'll get crap for using two subs in one chamber but there just wasn't a way to evenly distribute the air space (not easily anyway) if I wanted to play these subs through those arm rests. I also don't see these up and frying on me since I be giving them very clean power at minimal wattage.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

The door pods. Heres a example picture of a 2006 GTO door card for reference. 
http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l81/trappedinside34/YES/P1030056.jpg
This is the OEM woofer on the right next to the Anarchy woofer on the left.

Well the magnet on my anarchy barely even fits in the circle cut into the door for the OEM speaker. This is going to be a bit of a challenge. So I began routing out some rings for the speaker pods. This sucks in an enclosed shop.... 

I'm gonna need a bunch of these.

I used making tape and a sharpie to make a template for my 3/4 inch plywood baffles.

A little bit of sanding to clean up the rings and I glue them together to create two very tall MDF rings for the door portion of these mounts.

I mounted them inside the cut speaker grill on the OEM doorcard to check fitment and them drew a circle around them to mark placement for where I would glue and bolt the rings to the mounting flange.

Once these were put together I routed out the inside of the mounting flange. I bolted the two together with 6 heavy duty screws and wood glued them together. When that glue setup I covered the entire inner pods in wood glue. I let that dry and then coated them in 2 layers of bedliner. Because BEDLINER thats why. I took my routed and made two more rings and two outer mount rings that I would be making the outer pods off of. The picture above its the outer rings on top of the inner rings.

I covered the inner rings and the surrounding doorcard that I did not want to cover in fiberglass and mounted it to the door for fitment.

Bolted the outer ring up using 6 countersunk screws. 

I drilled a whole bunch of holes in the door, then superglued down my fleece to the door pod. It may look crude but don't worry I'll make it look nice.

Pods removed and ready for cleanup. I got a nice day to do this to! Weird that the next day it dropped 40 degrees


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

So I spent an hour or so cleaning the pods up. I like to make as much progress as I can with the fiberglass before I make any effort to bodywork and use filler.


first layer of filler down and sanded. Its not that bad, needs some more work.

I did a bunch more sanding and layed out the first coat of primer so I could get an idea of where I would need to work next. This is the point to where I lost all free time to work and school and had to let it sit for a while. The next week on my day off I needed to get out some tools and set out on making a set of winter wheels because I wasn't about to ruin my chromes. So I picked up a set of stock 17's for 100 bucks and I bodyworked out the worst of the scuffs. 

Then I settled on these paint colors. 

Layed out a coat of primer since I had to merge the powdercoated layer the bare metal. 

I put down a few layers of the of Ford Sunburst Gold Metallic (hated using a ford color but GM's gold sucked). Let it set and spent 4 hours with fine line tape making all of those blue lines you see.

Then I sprayed down a few layers of GM Spiral Grey Metallic. I'm in love with this paint color by the way

Removed the newpaper, let the grey metallic cure and put down 3 coats of wheel clear per wheel. 


Here they sit. I'm pretty happy with them though I'm going to need better rear tires if it decides to snow because this car can light them up.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Now for the fun part. 3D printing. So I have wanted my own 3d printer for a long time now. I've been a part over of one for a while but it only printed out pla plastic and only printed 4 inch by 4 inch objects so basically nothing useful. Anxious to get started I brought up my college copy of autocad and started modeling a set of speaker grills for the car.

Brilliant, I had the idea and the model. Now I just needed a way to print them. (other nice thing about making a model before I got the printer was I could order the magnets I will need for the grills with my printer parts for free shipping, because I'm poor)

Enter this pile of parts. These would soon become a 3d printer though I would do away with the stock firmware as well as the stock slicing software in favor of something else.

Prototype number one. Printed from ABS plastic with a .1 mm layer height. These deffinetly look like something pontiac designed. However they wouldn't quite fit over the anarchy's due to ABS shrinkage so I made one slight modification to them and printed out two this time.

The level of elation I had at this is unfathomable.....<<<<can you say vocabulary?

Perfect flush fit in the pods as if they were made for them. Then again they were.

Looking awesome, i'm honestly not sure if I want to smooth out the print lines

They will magnetically attach to the bolts that hold the anarchy in place. This means all I have to do is drop them in place. Even better the magnets press in so well I don't think they will ever fall out. Hooray for good math and design.

So proud of these


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Gratuitous speaker shot. Sorry but I really like these drivers

Onto the next 3d print design. I started sketching up a design for the mounting flange for the anarchy NZ3 and AMT to mount really close to each other to keep space as thin as possible. I figured theres no way I can use my router that precise since its massive. But I can print out a perfect bracket

So after 3 prototypes that were extremely close I came up with this 3 piece design. A mounting flange I will be fiber-glassing into the A pillars and a 2 piece grill system so I could give the speaker excursion room without sacrificing print quality. It also allows me to change grill color whenever I want.

I like how the AMT is raised to the surface like this.

I think this will look OEM enough to just kindof blend into the stock interior.

Just for fun after prototypes and tweaking plus 1 failure on my 3rd print ever this is all the cool stuff 20 bucks of ABS filament makes. Best purchase I ever made =).


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## bonesmcgraw (Jan 7, 2013)

Looking good so far. I used to do body work along time ago and I used to dread having to replace rear quarters like that. Mad props to your body guy for doing a great job.

I usually don't like gold wheels but with the grey metallic you added to them they don't look to bad.

Keep up the good work.


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## unemployedconsumer (Sep 24, 2010)

Awesome build!


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## bigbubba (Mar 23, 2011)

I've really been looking into getting a 3D printer and would like to hear your overall thoughts on the one you got. What table size did you end up going with? What about the strength of the parts you made?

Great job on the build so far. Looking forward to the progress on this.


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## teldzc1 (Oct 9, 2009)

Nice work. 3D printer looks like a nice tool to have. 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N900A using Tapatalk


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

So today I didn't get a ton of work done. I got up super early and made the 3 hours drive to kansas city to tailgate and watch them beat the raiders. So I only had a few hours to work when I got home.
-My 3d printer uses a 10 inch heated bed for those who are asking

So lets open up todays can of worms.

I took some more time and wet sanded the door pods back, filled in the last few little details with spot puddy. At this point I could have painted them silver and they would have looked awesome but I'm going for factory and I can't stand the idea of paying 25-30 dollars to sem for texture paint. Thats just stupid.

So I broke out some textured paint used for chairs. I usually use duplicolor textured metallic and paint over that. However after seeing volpen props results on the needler I had to try this.

Shot a coat of textured paint onto the first pod, then the second pod, then let them both sit for 15 minutes or so to flash.

Then I used krylon flat black, the same paint I used to paint my dash pod. Looks factory right? I'm really excited to get all of these installed.

Next part was finishing up the subwoofer box, or atleast finishing the physical looks of it. So I layed out some fleece in the gap.

Then I used resin on the fleece as well as 3 layers of chop matt on top of those.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Its been a while since I've posted but christmas at work has really taken a toll on my free time. At this point I have finished all of the speaker mount fabrication. I decided I need to add a brace to the subwoofer boxes internally for piece of mind. I was hoping the quarterpanel would reinforce it but I'm still worried. Anyway lets get to the pictures.

After resin and fiberglass plus some internal reinforcement on the outer panel the subwoofer boxes were strong enough to stand on. 

I added a coat of bondo and light sanded over top to give a more smooth surface for my spray adhesive to contact. This is so I would be able to cover the face of the boxes in half inch CCF. I also sound dampened the inside. No idea why, just seemed like I should. At the time I thought well I can't dampen the metal quarter panel with no space so lets dampen the box directly pressing against it. But the subwoofer box should act as a dampener so I don't know lol.

A bunch of CCF later and here is the boxes new front. These don't have to be pretty since the most anyone will ever see is a few inches in the middle of the subwoofers.

One of the two completed boxes. (For now)

I got out some 1/8th inch dowel rod and starting mounting the 3d printed baffles to the now uncovered a pillars. I 3d printed a panel to hold my laser pointer on these and aim them at the overhead light in my GTO which is a few inches behind the headrests in the middle of the roof. I got them as close as I could

Superglue. My hobbyshop sells this with way to high of a price tag since I know they buy it online and put a sticker on it. But its been my favorite glue since aerodynamics class back in elementary.

Layed down some more fleece using the same glue posted above

First sanding pass. Now its time for some fiberglass bondo.

Hours of sanding later and its time for spot putty. These are going to suck to wrap.

I have been following a holden commodore build on here for a while now and he used stinger grill cloth on his pillars to get a fairly close to OEM look. I plan on rewrapping (or rather I plan on paying somone because I have no idea how to run a sewing machine for this) the headliner and pillars in suede at some point so it just needs to be close for now. Man these sucked to wrap though.


And heres the test fit. The fit pretty snug but they look good. I'm just hoping they will fit with the faux suede dashmat I'm getting. 

I'm not sure when I'll be able to get it all installed since it may be spring break before I find some time between my full time work schedule and my college to wire it all and build the amp racks. But I do have time for little projects so I'll post that. I've been designing some desk speakers using my grand prix's old drivers.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

I have been planning a set of these since before I even bought the printer but after doing the airspace calculations and designing the crossover I had to make some serious modifications. So I snagged my vifa XT25's that I had left from the grand prix's pillars and My dayton audio DC130B 4's from its doors. These were kicking around since I returned it to mostly stock. 

Spent a while modeling these up and I had honestly planned on 3d printing them in clear red plastic like this design shows. However due to shipping issues and failure by amazon to send the right color on the replacement I'm using glow in the dark that I already had and another roll thats on the way here. 

Having never built a set of crossovers before I used some of what I learned in engineering physics as well as circuits and designed a set of crossovers. For the components I could find and a simple design the best I could do to keep it compact was a 2nd order linkwitz riley crossed at right about 2600 hz with a -6db attenuation on the tweeters. So far I'm very happy with it. So here's the tweeter half. The woofer half looks similar accept no resistors.

I set my printer file up for .3mm layer height since clear plastics tend to look more transparent with thicker layer heights. This also kept the print time at a reasonable 23 hours. This is the body printing, I printed its base separately.

Yup these came out sick. There really sturdy too. PLA has a knock for being a very rigid plastic so it suits these quite well.

I mounted the crossovers inside the enclosure using hot glue and as of this post I haven't put polyfill inside of them. However I'll be putting that in shortly since though win ISD says the .15 ft^3 of space is okay I tend to disagree.

This is the finished product. One of two completely bespoke desktop speakers that glow in the dark just for me. I need to pick up some better screws since I don't have enough though. I'm pretty happy with them so far and I love how they look.


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## bigbubba (Mar 23, 2011)

Those came out sick!

I really, really, really want to get one of those printers but don't think I'm smart enough to make it work.


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## Orion525iT (Mar 6, 2011)

All and all a great build.

Wish I had a 3D printer since I tend to make very esoteric enclosures that take tons of time and material to hand fabricate. 

When I saw the quarter opened up, I was thinking that the OP better use that space for some subs. The volume in the quarters seems huge and placing subs there just too tempting.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

So I've made a lot of progress
In fact its pretty much done.
I'll be posting a few more pictures of everything as its complete
As it sits everything on the interior is complete.
So lets start with the dash, its all been wrapped in carbon fiber vinyl and I think it looks great.


Theres not much build log here really I kinda just marathoned it and forgot to take a lot of the final install pictures 

I picked up some nuetrik reanes
40 to be exact and come cannare star quad cable in red,black,green,purple,blue, and brown this way I could color code the RCA's coming from the audison bit ten. They came individually wrapped too lol

I lined up all the connectors to make sure I had the right quantity

Soldering connectors, these wires are thick


next step was to pull the interior and run the wiring, there's not many pictures of this either but these is me scuffing off all of the old foam on the headliner since I recovered every pillar and the headliner in suede.

the headliner came out well and I'll have some more pictures when I'm not in a hurry, now onto the speakers

Drivers side NZ3 panel mount, I like how these grills came out but I have a glow in the dark set of trim rings I printed just for looks

passenger side NZ3 mount, these wound up being perfectly aimed right behind the dome light so I think they came out well the stage is a little high but I like it

the door woofers came out extremely well
I'll get some pictures with the grills off but the magnets hold really well and everything looks factory

just a grill close up, you'd never guess this was aftermarket

heres the passenger door just as great as the driver door
I'm really happy with the texture paint and satin finish

tossed in the subwoofer boxes, this is 1 of 2, one in each quarterpanel. Once they were in place i pulled the armrests and looked for subwoofer placement, then I 3d modeled some grills and began printing

this is grill 1 of 4, I they had to be modeled with the backs matching the contour of the arm rests so heres what I came up with


Came out quite well if I do say so myself. one grill per sub and absolutely no rattles.
I'll leave with a teaser to the amplifier wiring.
I didn't want to use a stupid kicker fuse block because its ugly so I modeled my own fuse block housing and printed it up
Heres the fuse mount in the engine bay. If you didn't know about car audio I doubt you'd even think it wasn't stock. I'll have more pictures up soon


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## unemployedconsumer (Sep 24, 2010)

So glad you took the time to put up the finished pics, very nice!


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## capea4 (Sep 2, 2010)

Nice job dude
I can't help but worry about the sub grills, in theory you built a banpass box 
The subs sit in the rear chamber, fire into the void behind the panel and port into the cars through the grills.
I was taught years ago that when a speaker is fired into an empty chamber that the chamber needs enough opening to match the surface area x 3.14 x excursion to not load the cone. Maybe that guideline had changed?
A grill the entire area behind the armrest would alleviate that? Select had a grill cloth that looked a lot like suede


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## capea4 (Sep 2, 2010)

I mean diameter x 3.14 x excursion.
Surface area includes diameter x 3.14


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## strakele (Mar 2, 2009)

Very nicely done. I really like the subs in the quarter panels and 3D printed parts. As a recent engineering grad I highly appreciate what you've done here. Keep it up!


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Thanks for the replies
I'll get the trunk cleaned up and post pictures of that and some better headliner and rear deck pictures to show the covered grills and my wiring back there. I also need to show some pictures of my processor mount. The bit 10 is in a pretty sneaky place beneath the glove box that is easily accessible.

I'm probably just going to go with either a masonite or plywood amp cover. The tricky thing
is going to be finding a charcoal carpet to match the rest of the trunk. The amp panel is just covered in black microsuede and it seems decent but I'm kind of a stickler for OEM looks so I may buy the normal grey carpet and dye it or something. 

As for the subwoofer mount acting as a bandpass box no affect so far. The dayton calibrated mic is showing no issues plus if you combine those grills with the normal speaker grill a little lower and then factor in how thin the panel is I imagine it impacts the tuning extremely little. Also if I do the math with a port of the area of just my two grills and don't factor in the factory grill assuming the air space behind the panel is about .25 feet and it is, its a flat response all the way to 250 hz and then theres a huge peak a little above that. However their crossed over at 80 with a 24db slope and theres no audible signal at that frequency anyway. Factor in the OEM speaker grills port space and its flat to almost 300 hz and yet again the Anarchy's are playing 80-300hz so it doesn't matter.
There are a number of GTO's out there running subs in the quarters with no mods to the covering panels so it seems okay. 

Only thing I'm unhappy with is I would've liked to time align the right and left subs separately but my bit ten can't do that. I need a Mosconi 4to6.


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## DS-21 (Apr 16, 2005)

That's really sharp work. Conception and execution. It's too bad 3D printers weren't a thing until OEM stereos were so tied into the other electronics (standard DIN or double DIN heads, etc).


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## Pseudonym (Apr 17, 2006)

stock wheels look better than the chrome wheels.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

Pseudonym said:


> stock wheels look better than the chrome wheels.


Would you believe those rims came on the car from the original dealership in 2006? They were a pontiac option at the dealership once they were imported to the states and therefore those ARE my stock wheels. There aren't very many sets of GTO FZ16 wheels out there MC2 was only around for a little while, they weigh in at 7 lbs less than the stock 17 inch wheels and in my opinion they look better.

But hey, you can't please everyone and the gold and black iron man wheels grow on you


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## WhereAmEye? (Jun 17, 2013)

I remember seeing this a while ago but forgot about it. Looks awesome. I'll probably copy your rcas too haha. 

Where did you go to school? And did you graduate?


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## LaserSVT (Feb 1, 2009)

Very nice man! Always liked those cars and often wondered about getting bass in them due to the gas tanks location.


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## Deathjunior (Aug 2, 2011)

WhereAmEye? said:


> I remember seeing this a while ago but forgot about it. Looks awesome. I'll probably copy your rcas too haha.
> 
> Where did you go to school? And did you graduate?


Still in college, I've got my mechanical engineering program through missouri S and T which is where I started but I came home to springfield due to many issues both family and financial. So for now I'm in springfield working on as many Mech E requirements as I can though I'll be out of courses to take here by next spring. I'm also an art student at MSU for a Bachelors of Arts withe emphasis an drawing and black and white photography (i may switch that to sculpture)

I took a couple more photo's today, at some point I really need to just use my nice nikon cameras for these but I'm always just way to lazy when I take them.

Here's the source of most of my music, when I'm not using CD's for the best SQ possible I use this, its a 2006 5.5 gen ipod classic I built from the ground up. It runs a 128gb compact flash storage card instead of a hard drive, upgraded black magic capacitors, an upgraded battery replacement, and the obvious clear faceplate you see here. I've got plans in the works for an iron man edition with glowing click wheel, and I have the parts to build a solid state U2 edition. I'm really proud of this thing


Next heres how my factory speaker grills came out, they are sound deadened on the inside, covered on the inside with CCF and then the outside was covered in suede. The speaker mounts beneath them have been covered with dampened block off plates and sealed with ccf.

Here's a better photo of the headliner, my only regret is that I couldn't recover the vanity mirrors


I've got two sets of grills, the black ones posted earlier but I've also modeled these trim rings that I think look a lot better but don't have that OEM look as much and also I constantly worry that someone might poke my NZ3's

This is my audison bit ten processor, at first I wanted to put it inside the console but there wasn't enough space, then I thought trunk but constantly having to walk to the trunk to modify settings really sucked. So I found then perfect spot on a removable panel beneath the glove box and with some audioquest 90 degree fittings I mounted it there.

Here's a further back view of the mount, no one can see it unless there head is in there lap but its easily accessible and it works.

Last but not least heres the amplifier mount for the time being. I intend on organizing it a lot more and making a covered panel for the wall. The panel they are mounted to is bolted to the rear gas tank brace with 4 bolts that have been drilled and tapped. I wired everything to where the whole panel can be easily disconnected with 1 wrench and a phillips driver should I have to remove the spare tire.

Here's some pictures of the custom made color coded RCA cables. I have couplersthat will be mounted to the panel and will be making some short runs so the RCA's can be a bit cleaner and more easily disconnected.

I should be able to do a bit more work soon but this is all for now.


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