First Steps: Audio

I began the Audio installation, first I had to test everything in the house before I tried to install it into the car. I got some Alpine mids and tweeters and some 6x9" cone speakers to cover the lower frequencies of the music to install into the rear of the car; and a relatively small amp (about 150 watts max) to add some extra beef to the audio system. For whatever reason, my father dug a 60ft trench a few years ago to run cables from his shop and his Edison cells that collect the energy that is harvested from our 2.5kw Jacobs wind turbine. One of the cables is a 12v wire (with a ground) which allowed me to test the audio system in the house - powered directly from my father's wind turbine.

Long story short - after a few tests, whenever the song reached the peak loudness the entire system would shut off and then restart and would kind of act crazy for a few minutes. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZZwwmHGoCw) And this was due to two problems: the amp wasn't delivering enough power to the three sets of speakers (tweeters, mids, and rears/lows), and the voltage was fluctuating from the wind turbine. When the speakers wanted to draw more power, the voltage didn't stay constant at 11-12 volts, it dropped down to around 9 volts - and then the system would just shut off. So I got another amp (690 watts max) and just prayed the the flux cells would be able to provide a constant 12v current to the audio system.

And I did test the system in the car when the new amp came https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdNbqj85Mc and the 12v did hold steady for the duration of the test song.

Here is a video of the relatively steady voltage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Srz7fn4GI&noredirect=1

After the successful test, I began the speaker installation. I started with the door installations, to put in the tweeters and mids (and these run in parallel, so I just have to attach the tweeters to some little outputs on the speakers).

I took the doors apart (my dad was holding it while I took a picture - you couldn't pull the panel more than 3 inches away from the door because of some wire connections):

I then took the stock bose speakers off:

Then the tweeters:

And then I had to install my own speakers:

and tweeters:

A super tricky part was trying to get this long wire through the little bridge between the door and the car (the little black thing that looks like an accordion) that required me to rip up a bunch of panels.

And here is one door that is completely finished. 

As for the rear speakers - I made custom boxes for them since there was not really any space to put them in the car. The 500 lbs of batteries more or less block any access to the original bose rear speaker locations so I needed to come up with a new location for the speaker boxes that wouldn't impair my vision or really cause any other problems. 

Decided location: on top of the battery box. The wooden top makes for an easy mount.

Here I was drawing out the sides of the boxes on some redwood scrap my Dad had lying around.

One of the fun parts: soldering all of the little connectors for the amp and for the rear speakers so I could take the battery box top off with ease (the little copper wire was soldered into little banana connectors so the wires from the speakers and amps could be disconnected easily).

The 650 watt amp in the trunk of the car with all the copper wire from the speakers and the blue RCA cables that run to the headunit and the little banana connectors.

This is the final installation of the rear speakers (with a chaos of wires).