Major JBL stereo upgrade but keeping stock HU

The layer of foam over the Killmat on the roof is called SoundCoat 1/2" thick Acoustic sound deadening foam and comes with the adhesive already attached. Just like the Killmat ,the adhesive on the SoundCoat foam is quite tacky and seemed to stick exceptionally well to the Killmat. I simply used a roller after pressing it in place to assure complete adhesion. The 56"x48" cut piece was only $44 from "bargaindude" on E bay and I had enough left over to use the balance under the traction battery. After driving the car at highway speeds I am Definitely noticing less noise from the roof. I can't wait for a heavy rain to see how it muffles the sound of the rain hitting the roof. Should be interesting.
The 50 mil thick Kilmat brand butylbased with foil sound deadener worked great on the ceiling and exterior door skins. Super nice to work with and easily cut with either a utility knife or a pair of aviation snips (I used both) Just clean the surface well with alcohol before applying. The 50 square foot box of Kilmat cost me only $60 on e bay from "soundcontrolproducts" which is a relative bargain compared to Dynamat and works just as well in my humble opinion after using both products. I first used the roller to smooth out the Kilmat and finished the application using the edge of one of my plastic panel removal tools to get a good adhesion. It seemed to work well and looks like it won't be coming off any time soon. Even after just placing the Kilmat in place with no pressure applied it sticks very well to the panels and best of all absolutely no smell at all from this product and it did NOT cut my hands to shreds !!!

 

I'm very happy with the results of the soundproofing and the materials that I chose to use. Especially the cost savings. (See my prior post from October 26,2020 on material cost comparisons. ) I did not have access to equipment to check before and after results of the soundproofing but it is a definite noticeable improvement in the daily drive. I originally purchased a 4 roll "Multipack" of the Soundskins Pro to use on the interior door skins and the floor for $295 on sale. I quickly ran out of materials since they are only 11 square feet per roll. They come 20" x79" long each so I purchased two additional rolls from Crutchfield during the install and had them in just two days. They cost $99 each with free 2 day shipping. Thank you Crutchfield. Love that place. Anyway...The kilmat was 50 mil thick and covered 50 square feet and cost $60 on eBay and the SoundCoat ceiling acoustic foam was roughly 20 square feet and cost $44 on eBay. All the materials used performed extremely well and overall cost me just over $600 with tax and shipping. I know people will wonder just how much weight was added to the vehicle with all this soundproofing so I will tell you. The soundskind pro is 10 Lbs per roll for a total of 60 Lbs. The 50 sq. feet of Kilmat which comes in a box of 47 pcs -10"x16" sheets weighs in at 18 Lbs and the Soundcoat roof acoustic roll weighs only 3 pounds for a grand total of 81 Lbs added to the vehicle. Basically the size of a small child. So far I have not noticed ANY change in gas mileage for the extra weight . 81 Lbs. is only the soundproofing. I have to calculate the total weight gain including the speakers, subwoofer, amps, DSP, wiring and misc. The Soundproofing proved to be the most time consuming part of this build. I have about 100 man hours in the complete install not including tuning the DSP,( which is yet to be done) and I would have to estimate at least 70 hours of that time is soundproofing the vehicle. I have more soundproofing pics to come as well as the rest of the build pics. Correct installation is about 90% of getting the most out of your soundproofing and therefore shouldn't be rushed. Leave yourself enough time to install it correctly.

 

Since you asked about the rest of the soundproofing ... here are some pics floor stripped

 

rear seat area stripped

 

left side of trunk area where the subwoofer will be installed

 

12 volt battery area stripped

 

tire well

 

Front seat area . notice the factory soundproof carpet under-padding and the white foam. These were re-installed after sound proofing the floor. Also the Two black heat ducts are removeable and just snap back into place

 

Soundskin Pro applied over the entire floor including the transmission hump. I ran the soundproofing as far up the firewall as I could get to without going crazy. There is actually some factory soundproofing in there already and going any further would entail removing the entire dash assembly. Not something I was looking to do at this point

 

Spare tire well with Soundskins Pro applied and Acoustic foam under the traction battery

 

As you can see, even with 6 rolls of Soundskin Pro I still ran short to cover under the subwoofer so I used the balance of the Kilmat under the sub for now until I can get more Soundskins Pro.

 

Next step was sound treating the 4 doors. Kilmat was applied to all the outer door skins after removing the door cards. This is what you see when door panels are removed. The yellow tinted plastic is the factory waterproofing treatment. I removed this on all 4 doors as it will be covered over with killmat and Soundskins Pro. I acheived about 80% coverage on the outer door skin with the Kilmat. You can see the stock JBL speakers with the orange colored foam

 

Next step was removing the stock JBL 6"x9" front and 6" rear speakers. A 1/8" drill bit is all that is needed to take out the stock speakers as they are riveted in place at the factory. I used nutserts in the factory speaker hole locations to attatch the new speaker rings and speakers

 

Next foam speaker baffles were applied to the outer door skin directly on to the Kilmat behind each speaker location. I purchased two sets of 6.5" Stinger Roadkill F.A.S.T. foam speaker rink kits which include two foam baffles for behind the speaker, one front foam speaker ring and one rear foam speaker ring.

 

This next part was likely the most tedious and nerve wracking part of the build. Running the thick 14ga KnuKoncepts KORD Ultraflex OFC speaker wires thru to the 4 doors. The front doors are relatively easy because it's just a large rubber boot easily accessible from the drivers and passenger side front kick panels . It's a straight run from inside the car to the location where the boot goes into the door with no factory plastic wiring plugs. HOWEVER...the rear doors are a different story. For some reason Toyota decided to utilize these pesky plastic wiring plugs on the rear doors. This leave you with two options. One use the factory wiring already going thru the plug into the door. They look to be either 16ga. or 18 ga. wiring. which would be fine for maybe a tweeter but I wanted to use the 14ga. KnuKoncepts wiring for my rear door speakers since I was installing both tweeters and 6" woofers in the factory door locations. So that leaves option # 2 ...Drill out the plastic plug to fit the 14ga. speaker wires thru ,which is what I decided to do. My install required that I get 2 pair of the 14ga wires thru the boot since my passive crossovers for the rear doors will be located in the spare tire area on my amp rack and not inside the doors. The Focal crossovers that I am using have both Tweeter attenuation switches of 0, -3 and -6 as well as tweeter crossover settings of 4 kHz,4.5 kHz and 5 kHz. which I wanted to be able to access for fine tuning so I did not want my crossovers mounted inside the door panels. I'm also not a fan of putting electronics inside the doors where moisture can ruin the components and the constant slamming of the doors can't be good for the delicate crossovers. If you were so inclined to place your crossovers possibly on the car side of your soundproofing then only one wire from the amp to the crossover would be needed to feed the crossover. My particular crossovers are Bi-ampable meaning each woofer and tweeter has its own crossover. You can see that in the amp rack photos. So the front speakers simply required pushing a plastic zip tie (DO NOT BE TEMPTED TO USE A WIRE HANGER OR ANY OTHER METAL OBJECT) The wires running thru the boot are not sheathed and are susceptible to being ruined by scraping from a metal wire for snaking the wires thru. Here's a pic of the front speaker wire going thru the rubber grommet I installed at the end of the front door rubber boot.

 

The rear doors were much more of a pain in the A%#. I started by decoupling the inner plug from the outer plug. This is accomplished by removing the waterproof boot on the outside of the B pillar which gives you access to the top and bottom clip that keep the two pieces of the boot together. Once apart I found a blank section right below the top two wires where I had a space to drill out for the 14ga. wire to run thru. I started wit a 1/8" drill bit and progressively worked up in size VERY CAREFULLY until I could fit the 14ga Wire thru the new holes. I then found the matching open spot on the door side plug and slowly repeated the process. Great care must be taken to not Knick or cut the factory wiring inside the factory plug. I'm guessing that would be an expensive proposition to repair so go slowly and carefully if you decide to to this modification.....DISCLAIMER......Do this mod at your own risk...Jus sayin. Now I still needed to get a second wire thru this plug for the tweeter but there is not enough open space inside the plug to fit another 14ga wire but there is still a way to fit the second wire. There is a spot on the outside of the plug where there is no factory wiring is to drill a hole for the second wire. You can see it in the pics. In retrospect I could have spliced into the 16ga or18ga factory wiring on the inside of the car and used the factory plug wire for the tweeter and just ran the woofer 14ga new wire thru the hole on the outside of the plug. This would eliminate the need to drill out the plug where the factory wiring is located. The speaker wire running from the Focal tweeter is only 16 or 18ga anyway so likely no loss of signal on the tweeter. Mark at Car Audio fabrications has an excellent full length video on how to do this process as well as many other great car audio video's on his you tube channel. Here are the pics from this procedure.

 

Yes Soundskins Pro and Kilmat were both applied to both rear quarters as well as the battery tray area . And yes that is a pre fab sub enclosure But more on that later...You're jumping the gun