So wifey picked herself up a nice little 06 Yaris hatch. As my luck would have it I was just finishing up another enclosure for a member and she decided that she missed having some bass in the car. A fast plan was scratched out in a night and by the end of the second day I had a nice little fiberglass enclosure for her car. Now this car is going to have groceries thrown in the back and doesn't really require any kind of show finish with vinyl or paint. Something that is
really easy to work with is box carpet. It covers up minor (and major) imperfections and and is a really tough finish for something that will take some abuse.
Carpet is availabdle in two flavours. Regular and vinyl backed. Vinyl backed works well on square enclosures because it doesn't like to stretch around organic shapes. It is tougher (its used on most PA speakers enclosures because of its ruggedness) than regular carpet and is also a little more expensive. For all intensive purposes in a car regular should be fine unless your dancing on whatever your putting the carpet on. Oh...it also comes in a few different colours. Black and charcoal are the most common though and finding coloured carpet may take a little more hunting.
To give you an idea of how rough something can be to come out perfect with carpet here is the enclosure right before its ready to take out and get covered. The black is rocker guard and the enclosure was rough sanded with some 60 grit and then some 120 grit before spraying it on.
Out comes the enclosure and it gets treated to a healthy coat of contact cement. Both the enclosure and the carpet need to get the cement applied. You don't want to soak the carpet so I generaly just lightly run the brush across the carpet so that the cement doesn't soak right in. Do it a couple of times and you will get plenty on the carpet without it bleeding through the other side. You can't see it too well in the pic but the cement is mostly strings going across the carpet. Figure out where you want your seam to end up. In the case of this enclosure the seam ends up right along the bottom where you can't see it. Carpet hides the seam so well though that if your careful you can have a seam right in the open and not see it. Test wrap the enclosure to get an idea of where the carpet is going to want to go and get an idea of where you should start applying it. This will also give you an idea of where you will need to pull or push the carpet down. once you have a rough idea of how you are going to start. So basicaly you gently work the carpet around the odd shapes by pushing (or pulling in some cases) it down into the cement a little at a time. Once the enclosure and carpet touch they are permanently bonded so go slowly and make sure you don't leave wrinkles.
Here is the seam along the bottom of the enclosure. Because of the shape the carpet was "twisted" on as it got wrapped around the enclosure. This means that instead of your normal single seam that you would get when you wrap a cubic enclosure this one had to be planned a little differently. I roughed up the seam a touch to make it stand out a bit more in the pic because it wasn't showing up
. Rubbing the carpet after the pic made it invisible again. You can still see my fingerprint in the second pic but the seam is all but gone. Make certain that you but the seams up close and if your cuts are perfect you'll barely see it. The white spots are from fiberglass/bondo dust that was on my fingers...you can see where I put them to butt the corners together
.
Doesn't really have anything to do with the carpet but you should be doing this when you use cheap terminal cups anyways. The cups can actualy leak from where the mounting posts go through the pl[astic. Fill them with hot glue and they will never leak...yes I filled a little more than I needed to...overkill is allowed though. Don't mind the crummy soldering...I ran out of rosin core....
Here's the finished product. As you can see the finish completely masks the imperfections that the enclosure had.
Here is a pic of it mounted back in the car.
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but it was stuffed in a 10W7 ported box screwed down and works well in the tire well 
nice write up too. 