Rudeboy

It's really better to contact me with purchase specific questions directly: [email protected] - I don't want to act like this is an SDS forum. This is a good opportunity to talk about general door issues. The first step is to apply vibration damper to the sheet metal. 25% coverage with a good quality product, weighted toward the center of the panel, is plenty. Interestingly, 700% coverage with a poor quality product isn't Now we get to the barrier layers. My very strong preference is to hang the barrier on the inner door skin, right behind the trim panel. The advantage of this placement is that it puts noise entering the door through the front, rear, top and bottom is behind the barrier. If you have speakers in the doors, you're also acoustically reinforcing the plane to which they are mounted. For this to work, the trim panel has to cover the entire interior surface of the door when it is closed and there needs to be space behind the trim panel. The alternative is to hang the barrier on the outer skin. I'll do this when the inner skin won't work or when it does but I want to add an extra barrier layer to make it harder to hear the door mounted speakers from outside the vehicle. I like to finish by lining the trim panel with a resilient and absorbent material to soak up a little extra noise and to thoroughly decouple the trim panel from the inner door skin to prevent rattles.

Velcro makes it for me - high temperature, vinyl compatible adhesive.

Curt, Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier. I think I may have misinterpreted your intent. I try to avoid commenting on competitor's products so can't help you much there. There's more to vibration damper than just foil thickness, so judging on that basis alone doesn't really make sense. I've never used or handled STP products. To be honest, stock photos of models, no technical information at all and the claim that they are derived from Soviet military technology haven't piqued my interest. 3M Thinsulate Acoustic is a remarkable absorber. It's actually used in some luxury cars. How you treat a door with airbags is going to depend on the exact details of the door. The safest thing is to do nothing. The obvious point is not to interfere with their function.

I'm sorry it came to this. It's never happened before and I hope it never happens again. I spent many hours, over several months, trying to find a solution that would work for you - despite your refusal to be forthcoming on a few occasions. There were too many suggestions that I wasn't treating you fairly during this time an it finally felt much too risky to continue. It's not like you just sent me an e-mail and I told you to go to hell. If you had told me you were planning to have me ship the materials to Sundown to be combined with what you were purchasing from them, I could have told you it wouldn't work, instead of wasting both of our time. I may have been able to suggest an alternative that would have worked. It's much easier to get things done when you are straightforward with people. I don't think you'll find anybody who thinks I haven't given them as much of my time as they needed. I finally had to say enough is enough. I put a very high value on trust and honesty. I continue to wish you luck.

Those amps were widely criticized for being ugly when they first came out. It's interesting how well they've held up with some time. Makes me wish I had room for my Minilith. Very nice job on the doors.

That's pressure escaping at the weakest point - bad for competing. The only thing you could do is rebuild the sunroof with stronger parts. Not going easy or inexpensive. You can avoid it by cracking a window, but that's probably going to hurt your scores too.

When I put new speakers in my doors I had less than 1/16" clearance between the magnets and the glass and between the mounting plates I built and the trim panel - with some of the trim panel Dremeled away. I doubt you made the holes too big. It's actually good to have a little bit of slop there so the clips can shift a little if they need to. Post up or call if you have any more issues.

The important thing is to not start hacking away at the MLV - most times when people do that they remove way too much material. Sometimes just stepping away for a while helps. It usually helps to remove it from the door and lay it in the trim panel to see if you're missing something. The clips need to go all the way through the MLV- some have "shoulders" that need to be cleared. If you can't figure out what's hitting, try sliding a strip of paper between the MLV and trim panel. Gotta feel around in there. Sometimes the thing that's in the way will make a mark on the MLV.

Haven't gotten it on the site yet - really hoping to have some time over the holidays. Maybe I'll post it up here first? Been patiently waiting for soooo long now 8 months or so and I weally weally wna see what you do before making any decissions. Sorry.

Haven't gotten it on the site yet - really hoping to have some time over the holidays. Maybe I'll post it up here first?

Yeah I'm pretty sure it is the rear deck.. the other day i had a bunch of people in my car and they had the idea to throw their bags up on the deck to see if the rattling would stop. The bags successfully stopped the rattling and it sounded so much better. Let me know if I need to further look into the problem and try some more things. That tells you that it's probably either the back edge of the trim panel rattling against the rear window (held away by the added weight) or the trim panel against the steel shelf (held down by added weight). Some vibration damper on the sheet metal and CCF between the trim panel and sheet metal, puled up over the back edge slightly should solve it.

As edouble101 said, it's important to identify the source of the rattles before doing anything. It looks like a simple rear deck without a plastic trim panel, so it should be easy to figure out. If you can stop the sound by touching or pressing on specific area(s), we should be able to find a solution.

Just hit the plus to zero it out. I'm sure somebody did it by mistake.

Do I have to sit here and take this? j/k BTW - Second Skin sells very high quality products.

There certainly is a Déjà vu aspect to all of this. 6 years ago it was common practice for sellers of asphalt products to either call them butyl or use the less dishonest but completely misleading "rubberized compound". It took considerable effort to get the new owner of the company selling product in this thread's title to remove the word "butyl" from his Web site. It was still on his eBay ads, the last I checked. The point is, why would sellers of asphalt products want to mislead consumers about what their product was made of? Why don't any of them use the honest term "asphalt"? They may claim that bastards like me have prejudiced the market but they were doing this before I showed up. More importantly, if there was a legitimate argument in favor of asphalt, why not make it with pride? There is only one reason anyone would try to confuse the public like this and it isn't flattering. The sad thing is that this argument obscures some very important considerations. The reality is that butyl that isn't formulated for vibration damping doesn't perform any better than asphalt - it's just less likely to fail. Even if a butyl compound is ideal for vibration damping, it won't perform any better than asphalt if it isn't paired with a sufficiently robust constraining layer. I learned early on that the people endorsing products I knew didn't work very well had very limited experience with other products. To a very real extent you only have to hold a variety of material in your hands to see and feel the huge differences between them. It's not rocket science. Using a product and getting some improvement is easy to misinterpret - slightly better than nothing becomes great! How many forum posts have we all seen where someone describes using P&S for years, then trying a purpose built vibration damper and being wowed? Very common. How often have we seen someone go the other way and conclude that asphalt was the better choice? I haven't seen any. After everything is said and done, even with a great vibration damper in hand, we still haven't dealt with it's proper role - one product doesn't do everything.

Appreciate all of the kind words. If I were looking for the single area to treat to make the biggest difference - particularly if improving door mounted speaker performance is a priority, fully treating the front doors would be that thing Vibration damper on the sheet metal and then CCF and MLV between the inner skin and trim panels. You really don't need to build separate access hole covers because the MLV acoustically reinforces the plane to which the speakers are mounted. Lots of traffic noise comes through the front doors so your also addressing the problem. Biggest bang for the buck treatment there is.

You won't believe how thickly you have to apply liquid products to get enough mass to block much sound. Then, after many coats, with drying time between each, you'll have a very thick layer of latex paint on your floor - a real PITA if you ever need to get under it. You also run the risk of the hard coating unifying all of the floor's components. It's completely possible - I've done it - to end up with a body that is resonant in a much more troublesome range than it was before.

The durability issue has been argued extensively. Having followed and participated in the argument for 6 years, I can tell you that a very common progression is: 1) strongly endorsing the durability of asphalt based products. 2) having the asphalt melt out. This has occurred with several well known advocates of extremely precise installation techniques. This isn't to say your P&S will melt. The VOC's could have dissipated enough to leave the asphalt as a hard and relatively stable crud. It is to say that there is a high failure rate. 66' X 3' for $200 works out to a buck per ft². Now consider that the marketing hype I'm pushing suggests covering 25% of the surface with a proper vibration damper. Compared to 1 layer at 100% coverage, you're paying the equivalent of $4/ft². 2 layers and you're $8/ft². That really kills the cost advantage. More material means more work. Add having to heat it and it's much more work. What happens if the material needs to be removed for body work? That's not to say that multiple layers of P&S won't create a barrier - a very light weight barrier, but a barrier none the less. It would actually work better if you didn't remove the release paper on the floor. So it's really a balance between doing more work for less performance. Throw in the durability "questions" and it just doesn't make sense to me.

That's false. Heat will greatly reduce the likelihood that it will fall off in a few days but does nothing to increase long term durability. It actually accelerates the deterioration of the rubber compounds added to the asphalt to improve heat tolerance. Luck is the only thing that plays a role in how long it will last.

The main physical difference is that mine has a much smaller cell structure. This give it better resistance to compression set (flattening out). No offense meant to Rick, but peel & stick CCF is firmly in the fish/bicycle zone. You don't need to glue CCF to the floor since the MLV, carpet, seats, trim and gravity will hold everything in place. There's a huge advantage to being able to remove this stuff and put it back in when you need to get under it to do that thing you never thought you'd need to do. I use Velcro Strips on vertical surfaces like this: This lets you fit the MLV first and then come back and add the CCF. This is a huge advantage with doors where making small adjustments in registration is essential. It also makes it possible to remove everything, should the need arise.

If you're chasing SPL and are willing to compromise the vehicle's function in that pursuit, seal them up. Otherwise, don't. If you're trying to stop noise, you may be able to implement a baffle on one side or the other that will help.

I was there for the testing - very impressive.

Do you mean that the sheet metal is flexing and you don't care or the sheet metal isn't flexing? What sort of sound pressure are you generating?

You do want to keep the vents. There are a few possibilities. The easiest is to see if you have enough clearance to add some closed cell foam at the contact points. If you're lucky, they'll open and close as they did before, but won't make any noise. The second possibility is building a baffle that will let air pass through and reduce the sound. Going to be more difficult and hard to hide.

Interesting problem. The mirrors are mounted to a pretty rigid part of the door. Is the entire mirror housing moving, or just the internal parts? Start with the basics: a rattle is always two or more hard objects making intermittent contact because one or more are vibrating. Does holding the housing stop the rattle or do you have to immobilize the mirror itself? If the housing is moving, does holding the door near the mounting point stop it? Use a test tone. Is the rattle in response to subwoofer frequencies or door mounted speaker frequencies. I'd guess sub since opening the door solves the problem.