Front Doors
As my car came fitted with the ‘Base’ system the first thing it is lacking are the tweeters in the front doors. The Focal component kit sorts this but in order to fit the new tweeters and keep the car looking stock I ordered the following two parts from BMW
51337171201 – Left Door Trim
51337171202 – Right Door Trim
The trim is exactly the same as the standard trim except as you can see it has the speaker grill and holder for a tweeter where the standard doesn’t.
Already on the car are foam inserts which sit behind these grills. They have a circular recess to snugly hold a tweeter in place. I almost ordered these inserts separately but they are not needed as they are already present even in ‘Base’ spec. I didn’t take any pictures of removing and re-fitting the above door trims or front door cards as there is an excellent guide available on the BSW website
http://bavariansoundwerks.com/produc...dan_Logic7.pdf
The only thing I would mention is that the door trims above are extremely sharp on their edges so don’t be tempted to run your finger between them and the metal door frame in order to pry them off, as I did, unless you enjoy slicing your fingers. Ouch painful!
I actually ordered a set of these off EBay for about £10 and have to say they are very good quality and helped me do this entire install without marking the car in any way or breaking any upholstery clips or plugs etc.
Front Door Cards Removed
Original BMW speaker is held in by three nuts
Original speaker removed
Paper cone rubbish out
Making way for lovely new Focals
Now this is where 808Mguy’s Speaker Adaptor Rings come in very handy. As you can see here they fit perfectly over the original threads.
And allow for an aftermarket speaker to be easily and securely mounted. Here you can see the Focal lines up perfectly. (Remember though that speaker depth is an issue so research what will fit your particular model first! Again there are some good threads on this forum.)
I decided to get some of this rubber foam strip (available at Focus) to make sure I got a nice snug fit between the speakers, adapter rings and door cards.
Here you can see it fitted to the adaptor ring although stupidly I should have applied it to the door facing side after mounting the speaker in the adaptor to avoid the speaker’s screws compressing the foam.
This I rectified by removing and re-fitting before mounting it to the door. (Note the addition of a plaster to my left index finger after my discovery of how sharp the tweeter mounts are!)
Speaker mounted to the Adaptor Ring
Here you can see the face of the Adaptor Ring where I later re-applied the foam rubber prior to mounting to the door card.
And the speaker fitted on to the door. Perfect!
Tweeter
The Focal tweeter comes like this
But after carefully prying out the metal grill and turning the actual tweeter inside its housing it pops out ready to be installed into the tweeter holders in the new door trims.
These actually clip into place and after re-inserting the foam backing mentioned earlier they were held in very securely.
I decided to apply Dynamat to my doors following the guidance included in the BSW PDF and on doing so realised I had discovered a nice easy way to mount the Focals sizeable crossovers.
After first checking the available space I could see that the crossover would have no problem fitting in the bottom rearmost corner of the door cards here.
I applied a Dynamat base layer
Before cutting a section just larger than the size of the crossover itself and inserting its mounting screws through from behind.
After sticking this down and applying a couple of reinforcing layers on the top I was left with a very secure mount for the crossovers.
Now this may look a little Mickey Mouse but this Dynamat is going nowhere and the crossover was left securely fixed to the door with little chance of any vibration!
Once this was done I connected up all my wiring taking great care to ensure everything was well secured to avoid vibration once fitted. Technics speaker adaptors were used and mounted near to where the original speakers connect up to the car so I was left with two truly plug and play front door cards ready for re-fitting.
You can see the two empty connectors ready to accept the Focal tweeters waiting on the car.
After re-fitting the front doors I tested the front speakers worked before moving on. I’m happy to say they did!