Shaker 500 8" door speaker replacement

[neoxaero]

My room-mate bought an 05 GT with the Shaker 500 system in it.. Needless to say, it sucks...

After adding some bump in the truck.. (roughly 2,600 watts... RMS worth..) We decided we needed to add some mid range sound to the doors (highs are part of the next phase...)

So heres a little write up about installing 8" door speakers.. Cause they wont just bolt up..

So we pulled the door panel off after removing all the freaking bolts from the speaker and still couldn't get it out.. Of course Ford put one in the back side of the door panel..



New speakers that he bought to put in the doors, Not the ones I would have went with, but they'll do:


Since the magnet is so big on the new speakers they wouldn't come close to fitting in the door panel.. Not to mention they the door panel hole is WAY to big for the speakers..


Instead of buying some MDF rings on E-Bay for 10 bux each, we decided to just buy a sheet of 3/4" MDF from Home Depot for $28 and cut our rings out ourselfs..

So we made a little "jig" for our router so we could cut out accurate circles..
After some discussion on how best to make this , we came up with this which worked out incredibly well..

(as you can see in the pictures it took a couple tries to get the holes in the right places.. whoops!)

After a couple tries we finally got rings cut out to the right dimensions..


Using the crappy Shaker 500 door speaker we marked the rings for the holes for the door panel..


We then laid the new speakers over the rings so mark where we wanted to put the holes for the speaker (to ensure they didn't hit any of the door panel holes)


We then drilled all the holes out with a small drill bit so the screws didn't crack the MDF rings (which is easy to do btw.. ). We then had to drill holes the size of the heads of the bolts going into the doors (the stock ones are WAY to large, so after a quick trip to walmart at 3am we got ones that would fit... Minus the huge head on them..)

To keep us from drilling to deep into the MDF I wrapped the drill bit with electrical tape for a depth gauge.


The MDF ring mounted on the door pannel:


Speaker mounted on the door panel:


And with the cover on it:


Over all it improved the mid-bass quite a bit, but now the stock 6x8's need to be replaced since they are all but blown at this point..

I don't have any pictures of the full setup at the moment, but I'm sure I'll be posting some when we're done with the custom box and amp rack (going to to be installing 2 more 12's in the trunk and upgrading to about 4k watts RMS..)

0ga wire is a bitch to run..


Now if only we could stop the trunk from vibrating and sounding like #### outside of it..)