The Art Of Fiberglassing Interior Show Cars.

[Primo]

I didn't type this out . Its written by someone else. This is just a basic tutorial. Once you get te basics you should be makin' dope shit in no time. I could probably redo a whole interior with this stuff. This example is to make kickpanels.

Here is a list of the things you MUST BUY to do fiberglass properly:

-BUY A RESPIRATOR: And I don't mean one of those crappy particle masks either. This is the kind that have the dual charcoal filters on the sides, and makes you look like some kind of alien. This crap is very bad for your lungs (both the fumes from the resin, and the tiny little strands flying about from working with chop mat). They cost about $30 at your local Lowes or Home Depot and are well worth the cheap investment. It sucks feeling short of breath for a week after you're done using this crap, so just take my advice and go buy one. Enough said.

-CRAPPY CLOTHES THAT YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT: I guarantee you that you will get resin all over your clothes and all over your arms. Find a raggedy old pair of jeans (yes long pants, unless you like mini-waxing parts of your legs by pulling cured resin bits out) and a long sleeved t-shirt. If you don't have any junk clothes, go to the Salvation Army or Goodwill and buy some specifically for this project.

-Fiberglass Chop Mat: This is the stuff that looks like a bunch of little white hairs all smashed down into a sheet. You will be using this for the initial layer you put down. You should get at least 2 square yards of it. I use 1.5 oz mat to make things go a little quicker.

-Fiberglass cloth: You will use this to build strength into the form that you are making. Again, I usually use stuff that is around 2-3 oz. weight to make things go faster, it really doesn't matter, and is up to you and what you can find.

-POLYESTER type resin: You don't want epoxy resin, not that you couldn't use it, but it just costs more. Also, the glue that they use to keep all the little fibers together in the chop mat is only disolved by polyester type resin. Epoxy resin is usually used in special applications like Carbon fiber and the like. You only need polyester resin, and the Bondo brand stuff that you find at Home Depot, etc. will work just fine. I'd buy about a gallon to be on the safe side.

-A BOX of latex type gloves: Get AT LEAST 50 gloves, as you will go through these things faster than condoms. These are the type of gloves you always see people snapping and acting like they are medical examiners. The most annoying thing in the world is when you are using chop mat and are wrestling the little piece of mat off of the glove covered in resin so that it will stick to the mold, and not you. I usually change gloves after every batch of resin that I mix up, as it's just not worth the energy fighting the spider web of mat strands on your fingers, rather than just throw the 10 cent pair of gloves away. They say disposable for a reason. I suppose you don't need these if you like being able to climb walls from how sticky your hands will be if you don't use them.

-A Dozen assorted CHEAP brushes: Go to the local Home Depot, find the absolute cheapest brushes you can find. I buy the 60 cent ones with the crappy wooden handles that look like they are made in Taiwan. These work great. I usually buy at least 6-8 1" brushes and about 4-6 2" brushes. When you are first learning how this stuff works, I can almost guarantee that you will go through a brush for every batch of resin that you mix up. This equates to a lot of brushes. Thus why the cheaper ones you can find, the better.

-Acetone: You will use this to put your brushes in after you're done with a batch of resin to make sure you don't end up with an ice chipper instead of resin applying instrument. Fill up a pop can, glass jar, or something similar and use one of your discarded latex gloves to wrap over the top. This stuff evaporates really fast. DON'T use a plastic cup to put acetone in, as it will eat the cup in a few minutes flat, metal and glass are about the only things I would put this crap in.

-Masking Tape: You will use this to keep resin from getting into your carpet. It will also give you a way of removing your mold, so that you don't just have a bunch of permanently attached fiberglass to your car. Get lots, at least two rolls of 2" wide stuff to be safe.

-An extra tube of hardener (aka: MEKP): This is the stuff you will be putting drops of into the resin to make it hard. Hahaha, get your mind out of the gutter, this won't work on the elderly as a Viagra substitute. If you're like me, you don't like to wait an hour for each layer that you put down to cure, so you add a few extra drops to speed things up a bit. This also comes in handy if you will be working in colder weather (50's or below) where it would cause the resin to cure slower.

-Various drop clothes: You will need several of these to cover up your work area unless you like having little bumps of hard resin on everything you were working near. Cardboard, newspaper, wood scraps all work well.

-Wooden chopsticks: The cheapy disposable kind that you get with takeout Chinese food work great. Use these to mix the resin up with.

-Plastic container: I use the ones from used up cream cheese containers. These work really well, because if you let the resin harden in the container, you can just push on the bottom and it will just pop right out. No big deal. Just raid the recycling, you're bound to find one.

First things first: Get everything out of the way, and remove your trim to get an idea of the space you have to work with.

Here is a shot of the passenger side kick area with the trim removed. As you can see, there is an opening in the kick area just in front of the door, it was the exact same on the driver side. I am trying to figure out a way to use this airspace and incorporate it into the kickpanel, as the more airspace you have, generally, the better the response curve you will have for your driver.

Now for the next part of the process, you need to tape everything off really well. You really need to tape off about 5-6" more all around than you think you will need for the kick panel, and this allows for some extra to play with in terms of size. One little note here: I use masking tape, and I overlap the tape starting at the bottom so that the resin doesn't try to run "under" the overlapped areas. Kinda makes for a shingled effect when taping. I do this so that no resin tries to get under the tape and into my carpet.

Driver's side area taped off

Passenger side area taped off with the driver's side mold as a reference, in an attempt to get the shapes as similar as possible.
Now is when you cover up everything else around you so you don't get resin on anything like the paint of your car. This makes for a bad day.
Now that you've read the directions about 10 times on how many drops of hardener to add to so many ounces of resin, it's time to start. FIRST you need to be sure to cut up a bunch of little 2x2 inch squares of the chop mat that you have before you go mixing any resin up, so do this now. I wear gloves when doing this because I don't like getting a bunch of fiberglass hairs all over my hands, which makes your hands itch. You had better have a really good pair of scissors, because this stuff is a royal PITA to cut. You don't need to be exact, just cut the stuff up into little pieces. Be sure to cut up both pieces of mat and of cloth.
Now it gets fun. Put on your gloves and be sure to have everything laid out well now.
Pour some resin into your plastic container. Eyeball about how many ounces are in there and add the correct amount of drops of hardener. Don't worry, you have time to work with it, it won't harden up on you in a minute. Be sure to mix it up really well with the chopstick you found.
The first thing you do is to put a coating of resin down over the area that you will be putting the mat down on. This layer will help to act as a layer of "glue" to help hold the mat in place as you are soaking it with resin.
Once you have the taped off area pretty well covered with resin, grab the first piece of mat and set it on the resin covered tape. It should kind of stick, sometimes it will take a little coaxing to keep it off your fingers.
Now take your brush and DAB the resin on the piece of mat. DO NOT TRY TO BRUSH THE RESIN ON. It will not work, and you will have fibers stuck to your brush and make a mess. You have to kind of "push" the resin into the piece of mat with the side of the brush, not the tip. This is hard to explain in text, but you should get the feel for it within a couple pieces of mat. This is referred to as "wetting out" the piece of fiberglass.
Congratulations, you just laid your first piece of fiberglass. Wasn't that hard was it? Told you it wasn't rocket science.
What you need to do now is continue what you just did, until you have gotten a nice layer over the taped off area. Overlap the pieces a little, as this will end up "locking" them together once the resin cures and making things strong.

Here is a shot of the passenger side area with a single layer of chop mat applied and being allowed to cure before proceeding on.
When fiberglass resin "cures" it will start to change viscosity, meaning it starts to get thicker. It also is an exothermic reaction, which means it gives off heat. How fast resin cures is dependent upon a couple things, what the weather is like outside (no joke) and how much hardener you squirted in. If you are working with a batch of resin and it starts to get more like working with runny jello, your resin is starting to "gel". This is the initial stage of the curing process and it also means that you have only about 5 more minutes to work with what you've got before it becomes a lost cause. It will also start to get warm to the touch at this point.
If I mix a batch of resin a little hot and it starts to gel up on me in the cup, I usually stop trying to lay more mat down, and just quicky coat the mold with the resin as fast as i can. No sense in wasting good resin is there? This will help to thicken up the mold faster. Trying to wet out a piece of cloth or mat with gelling resin is tricky at best, so it's best to just smear it all over and not try to lay any more may down.
Lay down your first layer of chop mat and let it cure. While you wait for it to cure, be sure to put your brush in the container with acetone, so you don't have to buy 2000 brushes. Next you want to mix up another batch of resin and do the process over again, this time with the cloth.
I usually repeat this until I have about 3-4 layers all over the mold. If you are quick with putting the layers down, you might be able to get in a layer of mat and cloth with one batch of resin. Don't worry if you don't, there is no race to be won here.
After you have a few layers down and cured, you will end up with this:

ere we have about 3-4 layers of mat and cloth laid down and cured. Once you are here, and are sure that the resin has fully cured (it doesn't still feel sticky or warm to the touch does it?) you are ready to pull up the mold and work on it outside of the car.
This can be a PITA, depending on how big your mold is. Just remember, there is an entire layer of tape holding it to your car's carpet, it will take some coaxing.
Once you have the mold out, you can pull off as much of the tape on the back as you can, but don't be worried if there still is some stuck on permanently, no big deal. You will then be left with this:

Here you can see the mold with the tape off and roughly marked with a permanent marker where I want to trim it, but before I do that, I need to add many more layers of fiberglass to the molds to get them more sturdy. I try to get my molds up to about a 1/4" in thickness just to be safe. Remember, in good audio, flexible enclosures and resonation is BAD.
I trimmed the floor molds around my floor mats, so that they would all fit together nicely and not be in the way of each other.
After you have the floor mold built up, you can go ahead and cut the baffles for the speakers. they typical shape is a "teardrop", but if you want exotic looking kicks, you can cut them into any shape you want. I chose the teardrop shape for simplicity.
After you have cut the baffles, you need a way of temporarily affixing them to the cut floor mold, also it needs to be flexible so that you can "aim" the baffles to attain the best imaging and sound stage. I have found that rediculous amounts of hot-glue and plumbers strap to be the best method.
Here you can see the baffles attached with the plumbers strap:

When you attach the strap to the wood baffle, it will adhere well, but when you try to attach it to the fiberglass, you will have problems. This is where I will repeat again: USE OBSENE AMOUNTS OF HOT GLUE. you want a larger surface area of glue holding the one end on the floor mold, as for some reason hot glue doesn't like to stick to fiberglass at all. There is nothing more annoying than having everything aimed just where you want it, only to have the damn glue let go and then you have to start all over again. That happened at least twice to me just in making this set of kicks, have faith.
Once you have the baffles securely attached with the plumbers strap and hotglue, now is the fun part, you get to aim the kicks. This basically entails pointing the speakers to get the "center image" right smack dab in the middle of the dash, all the while keeping a nice and wide sound stage. THis is the most important part of making kicks and is the whole reason of undertaking this project, so take your time, and just listen.
When I am aiming, be sure that you are sitting in the car (duh) in the normal position you are in when driving, and that everything is out of the way of the speakers. (this means no big bags of groceries in the passenger foot well) The key to aiming is just listening to how the speakers sound. This sounds so basic, but it can be agravating. I have found that having a wide variety of music to listen to helps out immensly when aiming. I usually use electronic music to test the stage width, as this type of music tends to have patterns in it that "strafe" from left to right fairly quickly, so you can see if you have a poorly defined left or right channel. You can also test stage height with this kind of music, as everything should be sounding as though it is at eye level. Lots of times you get very bad near or far speaker bias, where one side predominantly sounds much louder than the other.
Here is a shot of the passenger side kick during aiming:

Once you have the kicks aimed exactly where you want them, now comes a little bit of a tricky part, you need to remove them from the car, and using the same hot glue method, solidly affix the baffle in place with dowels so that it does not move around any longer. This can be interesting, as sometimes when you are attempting to ever so gently take the kick out of the car, the baffle wants to move about. My advice here is to simply attach a couple initial dowels to help assist holding it in place, then remove the entire unit from the car and add more dowels. Don't skimp on how many dowels you use to hold the baffle in place either, as they will need to hold the baffle "still" while you stretch the fleece over it in the next stage. I used about 6-7 well placed dowels to keep the baffle from moving.
Here you can see the baffle affixed with dowels:

Now that you are sure that the baffle won't move about, you can stretch the fleece over it to get the actual "kickpanel" shape that you are used to seeing. (Are you starting to wonder why you ever decided to start this project in the first place? That's good, it's about at this point when we all want to just drop kick the damn baffle and floor mold out the window, as it's taken about 2-3 tries to get it to this point, keep going, your almost there)
I use standard "fleece" fabric that you can get at any fabric store, or my especial favorite, Walmart. I usually get the remnants as they are good enough for what we are doing here. If there are no suitable remnants, just get 1 yard of standard (read: the cheapest and ugliest) fleece you can find. I usually go for a light color as well, because when you are trying to wet fleece out, it gets dark, and you can sort of tell when it's wetted out when you can almost see through it.
***On a side note, fleece is to resin, what your uncle is to alcohol; you can keep pumping that shit into it and it will forever keep taking it in. In other words, it's gonna take a crap load of resin to wet the fleece out. I think I used almost 16 oz. of resin to wet out EACH kick panel's fleece. YMMV***
Getting back on track...You need to cut a piece of fleece big enough that you can pull all the sides around the form of the kick panel. Something along the lines of this:

To get the fleece to hold in place so that you can wet it out without losing the shape, I used some contact cement lying around that I had. Apply it to both the fleece and the backside of the kickpanel, and allow to dry. Once dry, start at one edge and stick them together. Work your way around the kick and pull the fleece snug (not too tight, just so that it will pull into the shape you need, you don't want to move the baffle). Once you have the fleece stretched over the kick panel, you will have something like this:

Then you need to wet out the fleece to harden up the mold. You will be left with something like this:

After the fleece has set up, I usually put another coating of resin on the outside to help smooth things out, as the fleece is very textured initially after wetting out with resin.

Once this second coating of resin cures, you can cut out the holes for the midrange (or midbass if you are using 6.5" speakers) and tweeters. I have found that a dremel is invaluable when doing these projects, and will help you out immensely here. Wear your respirator when you do this, as it will produce a large amount of resin/fleece dust that is very bad for your lungs. (Do you sense a reoccuring theme here?)

With the holes cut out, you can now mix up about a cup of resin, and pour it into the kick. This will help seal up the inside better, as usually the resin doesn't soak completely through the fleece. It will also seal the kick along where the fleece meets the floor mold well. Be sure to coat the inside well.

With that done, you can trim off the excess fleece from the back of the kick. I usually leave about a 1/4" to 1/2" overlap onto the back of the kick, so that nothing decides to separate. You won't see this part of the kick anyways, so it doesn't really matter.

Now you can go about beefing up the actual kick with fiberglass, as the fleece has no structural rigidity whatsoever. You can see this if you push on the fleece even after the resin has cured, you can usually move it a little bit. Same thing as before, put a coating of resin down first as "glue" and then put the matt/cloth down and wet it out. I usually do a couple layers at a time, and try to avoid bubbles at all costs, as they weaken the fiberglass.
Once you have the outside of the kick beefed up, you are extremely close to being done!!!
Now all that is left is finishing the outside and attaching it to the car!
Which ever way you choose to finish your kicks (carpet is the easiest, painting is significantly harder, and vinyling is even worse than painting) is up to you. I choose to carpet for the sake of time, simplicity, and the fact that carpet won't show if it gets kicked (no pun intended) by a passenger.
To carpet, basically follow the same procedure as when you pulled the fleece over the kick to form the mold. (spread contact cement over the kick, and all over the piece of carpet, wait to dry, and pull tight over the kick)
To attach the kick to the car, I have found that just a single sheet metal screw screwed into the metal of the car (screw it in through the opening for the midrange) works very well, and will hold the kick in place. Easiest way is to just drill a small pilot hole through the kick, and use a self tapping screw to screw into the metal.
***One sidenote/suggestion***
If you drill a decent sized (approx. 2") hole in the back of the kick (the part of the kick that we have been calling the "floor mold") and let the midrange vent into the carpet, it *almost always* helps the response of the driver. I did this with this set of kicks and I am happy with the result. Just passing on a little "trick of the trade".
After that is done, all you have to do is wire up the speakers, screw them back into the kick, and your done!!!

[Suga Foot]

would look better if the carpet matched, lol.  That's a good idea using the fleece like that tho.  I think instead of using the hot glue for the dowels, I'd just use bondo.

[Sikotic™]

would look better if the carpet matched, lol. 

[Primo]

Its not my car i don't care. LOL.   I use hot glue to because its drys almost instantly.  If you use bondo it takes forever for that shit to kick even with obsence amounts of hardener

[Sikotic™]

Bondo is some crazy shit. Makes your eyes water.

[Primo]

TGI Fridays Strawberry daquiris taste like Bondo.

[Noon Bank$]

What kind of car was that done in? I have the exact same interior as it. Im guessing its an Eclipse.

[Primo]

yup^

[Da WCC Hopar!]

would look better if the carpet matched, lol.  That's a good idea using the fleece like that tho.  I think instead of using the hot glue for the dowels, I'd just use bondo.

u actually sat down and read da whole thing?

[Primo]

if you wanna save 800 bux and do it yourself than its good to read how to do it.

[Noon Bank$]

Word.. Its pretty easy. I havent done it yet but I have watched some people do it for the arm rests in the back seat of Eclipses/Avengers.

[Primo]

by the way. I just got a job at this place called xcessorize and we do everything. Fiberglassing, Katskin interiors, body kits, car audio, rims, exhaust, engine work, its the illest shit.

[Diabolical]

Id rather pay for it to be done.

[Primo]

If you were to pay for it to be done on large scale it could cost you anywhere from 2000$ up for a big job. I would pay 100$ and get the materials and have my own custom shit that i can say I did

[Suga Foot]

would look better if the carpet matched, lol.  That's a good idea using the fleece like that tho.  I think instead of using the hot glue for the dowels, I'd just use bondo.

u actually sat down and read da whole thing?

hell yeah I did.  I'm gettin a B2200 and I'm gonna make a custom speaker box in the box of the truck.  I got some ideas from reading this shit.