Coronavirus upgrade time!
When I got Vanity, she had a severely damaged stereo installation. All of the cab speakers had been blown. Some made some vague noises but the paper cones in the door cards were completely broken and no longer attached. One of the tweeters worked. The only working speakers in the van were the two rear Winnebago fitted speakers. Unfortunatly, only one of the two worked as the stereo had only one channel working!
My initial upgrade path needed to give me a working stereo. Allow me to connect my tunes. Give me a reversing camera screen.
Finding a single DIN stereo that has the screen extending down (rather than up in front of the vents) proved a search. I ended up finding a cheap Android Xtrons unit.
Gives GPS via built in android app.
Gives me internet radio without a phone (I used it initially with a generic USB 4G dongle but it now works on van wifi)
Gives me my music library on a SD card which syncs to my itunes library over wifi when at home (iSyncr)
Can do bluetooth recieving.
Has reversing camera input and can have steering wheel controls
Upgrading speakers was a little tricky as the door speakers are somewhat unusual 5″ units. As a stop gap (a 2 year stop gap), I slung some 100mm full range coaxials into the existing tweeter holes (Hertz)
With some time on my hands, I went back to looking at upgrading to a tweeter/mid setup. Was considering going Hertz pro but really meant 6.5″ mids. Stumbled across Hertz’ sister company Audison selling what looks to be a cheaper variant of the Hertz legend tweeter with a 5″ mid so I got these ordered up!
Fitting of course is never quite as simple as one would hope. The holes don’t tally with the old ones and the old speakers used a plastic mounting ring inside of the door card which too small to allow the rear cage of the Audison in. First attempt I removed the door card to work out how the hell I was going to fit them. In the end, just took removing the internal plastic ring, drilling new holes and using the metal clips for the screws (which came with the speakers). for the second door, I didn’t even remove the door card and cut the internal plastic trim out with a dremel.
Arguably they just fit or dont fit depending on your point of view as they are a little deep in one corner. I padded out that corner with foam and it works.
The tweeters I decided to fit to the original tweeter speaker covers. The little pods came with the speakers and I simply drilled holes for bolts and put some foam betweent the two. Foam was also added to the grille undersides to stop them rattling. Of course nothing is simple and one of the tweaters stopped working. Not wanting to deal with the return issues, I pulled it apart and fixed a broken wire.
Finding locations for the crossovers was a challenge in itself. Ended up with one screwed into the side of the fuse box holder and one bolted under one of the airconditioning air boxes (using the screw that used to hold the thermostatic probe (which broke, is unobtainable and I replaced it with a fridge thermometer)
Connected up and as part of testing panned the audio all around the van. . . . to find that one of the rear speakers had now given up the ghost. One of the small wires that connect to the cone was faulty. Not having any Audison options in a 4×6 I put in a pair of Hertz DCX 460.3, which needed a little bit of modification to their plastic mounts to fit the original grilles but otherwise fitment was simple.