993 - Speakers

From pcarworkshop

I finally had a chance to replace and upgrade my stock door speakers. I decided to go with Polk Audio 6.5" components. I got them for about $100 on flea bay.

The tweeters were too big to use the stock tweeters covers so I decided to recess them. The woofers were also a little too big to use the stock grills. Since the Polk grills weren't horrible, I decided to just use them. I'd rather have a more stealth look, but I can live with the Polk grills.

Step 1: Remove the tweeters. The tabs are located at eleven and five o'clock (on the passenger side - one and seven on the driver's side). I just pushed down at eleven o'clock (towards five o'clock) and they tipped right out. Then I unclipped the speaker wire.

Step 2: Remove door pocket. The door pocket is held in place by a number of Phillips screws around the edge and one under the flip up door next to the door pull.

Step 3: Unhook door pull. Open the doors handle about 45 degrees and then just lift up on the metal rod. It's held in place by friction and just pops out.

Step 4: Unscrew door handle. There's a single hex bolt (I think it was a #5) under the top of the door handle and two by the door pull. There's also a screw at the rear of the flip up door.

Step 5: Remove window switches. I use trim pulling wedge tools to pry off the switches. Once it's out, just unplug it. Be careful not to let the socket fall into the door panel.

Step 6: Remove speaker grill and speaker. The trim tools weren't strong enough to pry the grill off so I used a large flat head screw driver. Just stick it under the grill and twist to pry it loose. Take your time. Eventually it pops off. Once the grill was off I saw just how bad the speakers were. The speaker is held in by four screws. There are two sets of speaker wires that go into the stock speaker. Since the stock speaker has a built in crossover, one set of wires goes to the head unit and the other set goes to the tweeter. Unplug both sets of speaker wires. I pulled the green wires out since I would be running new speaker wires from the new crossover to the tweeter.

Here, you can see the green wires go from the woofer hole to the tweeter hole.

Step 7: Take off door panel. After removing the door pocket and unbolting the door handle, the only thing holding the panel on are three or four trim plugs. Using trim panel wedges, carefully pop out the plugs and remove the panel.

Step 8: Install tweeter. The Polk tweeters have a recessed mount that requires a two inch hole. First, remove the metal bracket that holds the stock tweeters. Then, cut the vinyl with a sharp razor. To cut the hole, I used a two inch hole saw. The recess mount drops right in. There is a metal bracket that it screws into that holds it in place. Feed the tweeter wire through the mount and push the tweeter in place.

Step 9: Cut hole ... in door (gulp). Using the same hole boring bit (Dewalt bimetal hole cutting bit) carefully cut a 2" hole in the sheet metal directly behind the tweeter. In hindsight, I should have used a slightly larger one since the metal bracket is a little larger than the mount. Since the sheet metal is so thin, it only takes about 20 seconds to cut the hole.

Step 10: Install woofer. The woofer attaches with four screws. Luckily, the 6.5" woofer takes up the same amount of space as the 5.25" stock Nokia speaker so no cutting was necessary.

Step 11: Install crossover. I decided to mount the crossover in the door pocket. It attaches with two screws. I drilled a small hole through the panel next to the crossover to run the wires.

Step 12: Connect wires. This was the easy part. Connect the tweeter wires and woofer wires to the crossover. I cut off the wire plug on the stock wires and attached crimp on bullet connectors to the stock wires. Then, I attached speaker wire to the crossover input with bullet connectors to attach to the stock speaker wires.

Step 13: Put panel back on. Panel goes back on in reverse order. Make sure you don't forget to attach the bullet connectors together. Here is the final result.

Many thanks to geolab for his 993 Door Handle Removal Gasket Instructions. Next, I'll tackle the 4x6 rear speakers using H.H.Chinn's Replacing Rear Deck Speakers thread.

That's it! The sound quality is night and day in comparison to the blown Nokia speakers. All in all, this was a fairly easy install. Probably a 5 on a scale of 1 - 10. The first side took me about an hour and a half. The second side took about 45 minutes (including taking photos).

Original Article Credit : Nuff/Rennlist