fordrides.com - How To: Building Custom Fiberglass Enclosures

How To: Building Custom Fiberglass Enclosures

Submitted By: Morgan-Tec

Overview

Here is an easy step by step on how to build custom full fiberglass boxes for subs or anything else you want.

Required Material

1-2 gallons of fiberglass resin from home depot or a boat repair shop.
3-4yrds of fiberglass mat material from a boat repair shop.
Latex gloves.
2-3 rolls of 2" blue painters tape from any home improvement/hardware store.
A few cheap 2" paint brushes, these will be getting trashed so don't get good ones.
A plastic drop cloth.
A few old tuperware bowls that will be trashed.
3-4 yrds of a good thick polyester fleece.
A hot glue gun and glue.
MDF rings to fit your speakers or components. You can make these if you are able to, or you can have a local stereo shop make them for you pretty cheap.
A 3' piece of 3/8" wood dowel for bracing the speaker rings.
I used T nuts in the wood so that I can remove the components easily, and reinstall. But you can also use drywall screws for installing them as well.
A router to cut out the component holes.
1 gal of a quality filler such as marglass, or if you have to you can use bondo.
Procedure

Cover the entire area you want to fiberglass with 2" blue painters tape.

I used aluminum foil over the tape instead of doing the mold release method. You tape the foil down using only about 1/4" gaps. That way you can rip off the tape when you pop out the boxes.

After this use a marker to mark out your basic outline you want for the boxes. See black lines on foil.

Then, just paint on the resin and then lay on the glass cloth, i used 7" squares.

Here are the forms with a few layers on them right after i popped them out of the truck.

After this you layer a few more layers on untill you get the thickness you want. I went to about 1/4" thick.

Then, you trim down the forms to your outlines that you did on the foil and test fit.

After this I installed the speaker rings and then streached my fleece around the boxes. Make sure you put in the T nuts into the wood before you do this step or you will have problems.

Then just soak the fleece with resin.

After a few coats of resin on the inside, glass and resin on the outside. I used a router to trim out excess fleece from my rings.

And test fit the components.

After all this has cured start spreading a good filler over the top to smooth the surface for paint. I used marglass which is way better than bondo. After several coats of this and sanding you are ready for paint. Here are the freshly painted boxes:

Then you are ready for install. Now if you don't want the show quality of paint then you can go from the dryed resin step and just strech carpet or vinyl over the boxes and glue it down. Here are the finished installed units:

And that's it, not really that hard just make sure you follow the steps, because if you short cut you may have to start over from scratch.