Alpine e30 progress/build thread
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Looking great! Sort of off topic, but what enclosure do you have for your 3d printer?
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Looking great! Sort of off topic, but what enclosure do you have for your 3d printer?
Thanks! My enclosure turned into quite the project haha. It is based off the Prusa Ikea Lack V2 design (https://blog.prusa3d.com/mmu2s-printer-enclosure_30215/) so that I could order precut plexiglass, but I redesigned basically the entire thing. I changed the frame parts so that the entire top box can be removed, the wire passthrough for the power supply are a two piece threaded part that is a lot cleaner, added some features so I could lock down the top (makes it a lot easier to lift off the enclosure), and made some filler strips that seal off the perimiters of the plexiglass and top/bottom of the doors. I also did a filament spool holder and feed inside the enclosure instead of on top to keep dust off the filament. Next improvements are an internal light and possibly a filtered exhaust fan.
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Awesome! I'm in the process of making an enclosure from ikea lack tables for my maker select V2. I need to be able to print with ABS and ASA pronto! Lol. Can I ask where you got your plexiglass from?
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Awesome! I'm in the process of making an enclosure from ikea lack tables for my maker select V2. I need to be able to print with ABS and ASA pronto! Lol. Can I ask where you got your plexiglass from?
Nice! Those Lack tables are pretty great for like $12 haha. I ordered it from here: https://www.printedsolid.com/products/v2-acrylic-sheets-for-prusa-lack-enclosure. They also have the V1 plexiglass that are a bit shorter.
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Slow progress is still progress!
After some extensive measuring I decided on some Polk DB+ 6.5" component speakers for the front and 5x7" coaxial speakers for the rear. While I had the front all pulled apart for the amp I decided to start there with the speaker upgrades. My car originally came with the basic 4 speaker sound system so I did not have the tweeter housings in the doors. The Polk tweeters have a nice basic black grill but are an odd rounded shape on the outside so they wouldn't necessarily be an easy fit in stock e30 tweeter pods. I didn't want to just surface mount the tweeters on the stock blanks so I decided to design and print some mounts of my own. I started with a basic model of a tweeter blank I found online and modified it to be mounted with a screw and perfectly fit the Polk tweeter at an angle that matched the stock ones. After a bit of trial and error I printed the final parts in ASA. To finish them up I sanded them down, sprayed with filler primer and sanded again to completely smooth them out, then a coat of texture paint followed by a final pass with SEM trim black. I mounted the tweeters from the back with hot glue so that they wouldn't be impossible to remove if needed, we'll see how that holds up in a hot car.
Good news for me is that cars with the base sound system still have the tweeter wiring going into the door, so these just plugged directly into that and fit perfectly! I'm super happy with how they turned out.
I also got the 6.5" woofers mounted in the kick panels. The speakers have the normal 4 mounting holes as well as an inner circle of holes that turn out to line up perfectly with the 5.25" speaker pattern (which I would assume is intentional). Because they'll be tight under the kick panels I printed a ~3mm spacer to keep the mounting screw heads off the speaker surround as well as keep the kick panel from interfering with speaker cone movement.
These Polk 6.5's are pretty shallow and also don't protrude too much beyond the mounting surface so zero modification to the chassis was required to fit them. I did however, have to modify the kick panel trim. I removed the sound insulation/speaker mesh and trimmed away the plastic ring around the speaker grill and the back side of the one screw hole. I also used a heat gun to flatten them out a bit as they had warped into a concave shape over time. The speaker sticks out maybe 5mm further than the original so these have to flex around them a little bit, but once installed they look completely stock and don't have any gaps. I may go back and replace the sound insulation at some point, but going to try without for now.
I don't have a pic of the kick panels installed but it looks completely stock. No need to space out the hood release on the driver's side and zero clearance issues with anything there. I am still working on the passenger side but so far it looks like the glovebox will clear without issues as well.
Next job is wiring in both crossovers and finding places to mount those!
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Just running off of the factory AMP and headunit? **Reading your previous posts now**. The stock Premium system in my car sounds decent, but wouldn't mind some additional punch on the low end. Really don't want to alter the look of the rear decklid speaker housings, so maybe these in the kick panel would be a good option. Maybe replacing the tweeters as well.
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Just running off of the factory AMP and headunit? **Reading your previous posts now**. The stock Premium system in my car sounds decent, but wouldn't mind some additional punch on the low end. Really don't want to alter the look of the rear decklid speaker housings, so maybe these in the kick panel would be a good option. Maybe replacing the tweeters as well.
I don't have a factory amp in my car so I used a small Sony amp that can work with the speaker level outputs from the continental head unit. I totally agree on not wanting to change the rear speaker look since most larger aftermarket speakers look like you landed a UFO on the decklid... so my plan for the rear 5x7's is to design and print something similar to the rear premium speaker housings (though maybe just a flat top instead of the angled outside edge). A main goal for this project is to have the end result be almost completely stock looking.
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Things I've done to the car since my last update... nothing!
While I've enjoyed having a running car that I can drive any time I want, there's been some issues needing addressing and I've started to plan to improve a number of things. One thing I've noticed is that the pressures in the intake manifold were constantly negative and I don't have time for all that negativity. In a random late night marketplace search I came across this lovely chunk of positivity for a pretty good deal...
It'll be a while until I dig in and start fitting this as I want to finish my garage improvements first but it should make for a pretty fun project later this year(s).
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Things I've done to the car since my last update... nothing!
While I've enjoyed having a running car that I can drive any time I want, there's been some issues needing addressing and I've started to plan to improve a number of things. One thing I've noticed is that the pressures in the intake manifold were constantly negative and I don't have time for all that negativity. In a random late night marketplace search I came across this lovely chunk of positivity for a pretty good deal...
It'll be a while until I dig in and start fitting this as I want to finish my garage improvements first but it should make for a pretty fun project later this year(s).
That is awesome. I figured this post would be about the headers and I was pleasantly surprised! We’re down on FI e30s right now so this should reset the balance quite nicely
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I have to you snagged that one after it had been floating around for a bit on FB. I'm glad someone I know snapped it up as I was contemplating it myself, twin screws satisfy most of my desires when it comes to power additions.
I'm looking forward to seeing more about it!
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That is awesome. I figured this post would be about the headers and I was pleasantly surprised! We’re down on FI e30s right now so this should reset the balance quite nicely
A very convenient coincidence! They should play quite nicely together. Picnic 2045 or bust!
Nice score!
Thanks!
I have to you snagged that one after it had been floating around for a bit on FB. I'm glad someone I know snapped it up as I was contemplating it myself, twin screws satisfy most of my desires when it comes to power additions.
I'm looking forward to seeing more about it!
I've always thought one of these ESS TS2 kits would be my ideal setup if I could ever find one. After staring at the ad and contemplating for like a week I figured how often would one actually pop up locally in good shape for a good price. I'm excited to dig into it!
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10/10 find
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160k
After much thinking and hunting around I finally came up with a solution to put 5x7 speakers in the rear parcel shelf without cutting big holes or looking like someone landed a UFO back there.
Before I did anything with the speakers themselves I figured now's the time to refresh the parcel shelf itself. I had a spare standard speaker parcel shelf so I used the markings on the back and opened up the speaker cutouts and moved the mounting clips to the premium speaker layout. Since every parcel shelf is now faded to a lovely shade of light blurple I gave it a couple coats of black duplicolor vinyl/fabric dye and cleaned up all the plastic parts.
Once that was done (and after letting it dry for about 3-4 months), I got into swapping things out. With the old parcel shelf out, I added some sound deadening over any holes in the sheet metal and a few spots that made a lot of noise when tapping on it. My thinking on doing this was it should help the speakers perform better/keep more sound in the cabin/maybe reduce some road noise bleeding through from the trunk.
Side note: I've always hated the tan rear seat in my car ever since I put it in. Its in really good shape and the original plan was to dye it eventually, but I realized I have a perfectly good black sedan back seat sitting in my basement. My car is a coupe so the seat isn't a perfect fit, but I also happen to have the rear carpet section from that sedan so I swapped that in as well to get everything looking as factory as possible. While it still isn't blue, it looks so much better.
Back to the speakers. After much hunting around and thinking, I came across these speaker grills from a 90's ford van/ranger/etc. that had an identical grille pattern to the kick panel speakers in the front. I found someone selling NOS ones and ordered a pair. With the new decklid in place, and the grill/speaker (Polk audio DB+ 5x7 coaxial) in hand, I designed and 3d printed the adapter to make it all work.
The adapter has slotted holes to screw into the factory e30 parcel shelf premium speaker clips so you can shift them around and maximize speaker clearance, matches the profile of the ford speaker grilles, and spaces the speaker up high enough to require no hammering/cutting of the sheet metal underneath. It is printed in ASA which is UV stable and should have zero issues dealing with the heat inside a car parked in the sun. To finalize the fit and finish, I screwed the speaker grille to the adapter and sanded the outer profile as a unit to get rid of layer lines and align everything perfectly.
I obviously didn't want a gray speaker cover, so that got scuffed up and sprayed black with adhesion promoter and SEM trim paint. The adapter was then sprayed with adhesion promoter and filler primer, sanded smooth, then another coat of adhesion promoter to re-coat any exposed plastic, textured black paint, and a final top coat of SEM trim black. I did this same process on the tweeter pods and it's held up perfectly so far.
With everything painted it was time to mount it all up! Here is the adapter mounted to the parcel shelf:
Then the speaker gets mounted to the underside of the ford speaker grille. To fit the speaker I did have to remove a trim ring/spacer from the top side of the speaker and use a tin snips to remove the outer mounting tabs/trim a bit of excess material on the other mounting tabs. Also, because of the placement of the wire connections, I bent the connectors outwards 90 degrees so that they would clear the parcel shelf without having to cut a notch in it.
I then mounted the speaker assembly to the adapter in the car and went back and did the whole thing a second time!
Couldn't be more stoked on the end result! It looks very factory and the sound improvement over the previous 5 1/4" coaxial speakers is huge.
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Speakers look good.
I need to do that with my parcel shelf this summer as mine is also a nice grey/purple.
Are these running off the stock amp?
Thanks! And nope, my car had the base sound system so I didn't have a factory amp at all. I used a Sony XMS400D amp inline with the speaker wiring. It basically takes the 4 speaker level inputs from the headunit and puts out 45watts RMS to each speaker.
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Looks awesome, love the creative use of the 3D printer. I’m sure the sound improvement is awesome, and it really does look very OEM. Great work!
Thanks! Having a 3d printer that can print in durable materials has opened up a lot of possibilities for all kinds of fun stuff.
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So I was working on my basement over the weekend and went to move the original seats from this car. As I carried them across the basement at an awkward angle a coin fell out from somewhere deep in the seat and went pinging across the floor. I figured it was a quarter or something. Nope. It's a 1988 Austrian 1 schilling coin.
I did some googling and Austria switched to the euro at the start of 2002... so either someone went on a European vacation and lost a coin when they got home, it's been in the seat since the car was built, or the car spent some time in Europe. Either way it's pretty neat.
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