Adapting the rear door speakers

I’m back from the Thanksgiving break. I hope all of you who celebrated had a nice one, and those of you who did not had a good time doing whatever you were doing too.

Having beaten the front speakers into submission in the ugliest way possible it was now time to do the same in the back. I did this already on the passenger side and promised to show how I did it. The “how” here is tied to the mechanism by which the plastic speaker grille is attached. The edges of the grille have tabs that lock into slots cut into the metal part of the speaker bracket. Unfortunately the speaker and the bracket are integral so it’s not like you can just mix and match. That leaves the options of either fabricating a new adapter bracket or doing what I did – hack up the old speakers for the bracket part.

This is the post Dremel (the choice of half-assed fixes the world over!) cutting away the speaker from the bracket. The metal is quite thin so it only took a moment to cut through using a fiberglass reinforced cut-off wheel. I don’t recommend using the non-reinforced wheels for this as they will wear down very quickly against steel.

As you can see, my speaker sits quit nicely beneath the bracket. Instead of the pain-in-the-butt blind rivets Volvo used I elected to use a few M4 sized screws. This will make it much easier to change speakers if I ever desire to do so.

And here it is back on the door card. I have to paint up a guide casing to go on the door itself before I can install the card. I actually did that this past weekend but didn’t have an opportunity to actually put it in. Stay tuned for that.

Always remember this

Cars are not as complicated as you think. They’ve been doing more or less the same thing for 110 years. Sure the engineering has gotten better and the tolerances tighter, but it’s still “air and fuel go in, spark happens, and explosions moves piston.” Treat it like that and all shold be well, right?

Saturday morning stuff

Anticipating a busy day, I took the morning to get a couple of things I had waiting finished up. I installed the rear passenger door card. I figured out how to mount my new speakers using the old grill system. The details of that will be forthcoming, but here is the end result.

I also got my driver’s side tail light turn signal working. The terminal contacts only needed a bit of cleaning!

Many and varied new motors

Friday brought my a variety of new parts, both of which are essentially motors of one kind or another.

Specifically, a new, after market windshield wiper motor and a new, after market fuel tank transfer pump. Both are after market because original Volvo made ones are craaazy expensive. The guys at Clean Flame Trap recommended the Airtex E8778 as the after market transfer pump of choice, so I went with that along with a fuel strainer from good ol’ Delphi parts. The wiper motor is MTC.

Click continue to see the process.

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