The stock 6 1/2" speaker after removal of the door panel

2) You are now staring at the subject of much discussion, the 6.5" stock dual cone speaker. What a pathetic sight! This is mounted to a larger black plastic frame by three screws, and the whole assembly is secured to the door by 4 screws. Remove both the speaker and the frame (you’ll be separating these anyway).

New speaker mounted in the stock location using the modified stock frame.

3) With the speaker removed from the frame, you’ll see the frame is actually a basket that limits the depth of the speaker. If you have a high quality speaker (5.25" like mine) or 6.5", it’s going to hit the back of the basket. Your task is to the remove the back of the basket. For this part I used the tin snips to snip out an area large enough for the new speakers’ magnet to fit.

*Roll the window down first, you’ll see the window track. Your new speaker MUST not hit this! *

4) Mounting the new 5 ¼ inch speaker was easy but since the only one of the 4 holes on the new speaker matched up with the old speaker holes I had to improvise. I reused one of the holes, and used self tapping screws to make new attachment points in the soft plastic frame.

Crossover in the plastic "box"

5) I won’t go into the details of the exact wire routing, but suffice to say I cut off the stock factory speaker plug and extended the wires toward the rear of the door where the crossover will be mounted. Your speaker codes are as follows: Driver side, green/yellow is "+"and grey/red is "-", Passenger side, light green is "-" and dark green/black is "+"

A rear view of the door panel, note the crossover in the stock box.

6) I decided to mount the crossover onto the door panel itself inside the black ABS "box" attached to the rear portion of the panel. I had to cut the box slightly to allow my crossover to fit, other crossovers are usually not this large and should fit with no problem. The utility knife was the best tool for this.

I didn't want the tweeter to "show-off" too much.

7) After wiring the stock output to the crossover, and returning the woofer output to the new woofer I now had to concentrate on the tweeter. I was going to mount the tweeter behind the stock grill, but decided against it for two reasons. First, my leg already blocks the sound coming from that speaker, putting the tweeter there would negate the advantage gained by the speaker upgrade. Second, although there seems to be lots of room, I am concerned with clearance.

CAUTION go slow here, you don’t want the vinyl to "snag" on your drill bit!

8) My tweeters required three holes in the vinyl on the door panel. Two were for mounting and one for the wires to go through. This was the hardest part! Making sue the mounting was even for both sides, and just the pressure of knowing that a screw up is hard to cover up! At this point there is no "going back" so take a deep breath and cut into that door panel! My car is has the red interior, so the door panel has the red trim accents, only the rearward portion is leather, once the perforations stop, you’re on vinyl. I used a center punch to push through the vinyl and the plastic backing. Once this was done, I used my drill to enlarge the hole.

The finished speaker with the door panel installed.

9) That’s it, just reinstall everything and you’re done. One note, due to time constraints I did my final wiring with butt connectors. I’ll have to go back in to change these to some form of quick release connectors. Since the crossover is mounted to the door panel, you have to cut or disconnect these wires to totally remove the door panel. This could be a problem down the road if it should require service or when I tint the windows.