Rudeboy

Barriers work in both directions. Nothing you can do when the windows are down. In a perfectly deadened car the windows are going to be the weak link when they're up. Nothing you can do short of completely rebuilding the car.

While I try to avoid specific comments about what are now my competitors, a few general concepts are unavoidable. One is that a constrained layer vibration damper needs a decently thick and strong constraining layer. Thin foil or Mylar doesn't meet that standard.

I was thinking the exact same thing. And since he has too much class to shamelessly plug his own link.....I'll shamelessly plug it for him If you haven't yet, click the link in Don's signature. Plenty of great information on that site that should help point you in the right direction. Thanks for the kind words Especially since that most effective product might be a small piece of tape or some inexpensive closed cell foam strategically placed. The shotgun approach is seldom the best way to go. This is one of the few areas I can think of where people are so willing to use an indirect treatment and hope it solves the problem. Imagine you have a small box in your garage that you want to paint. You can either get out a brush or a rattle can and paint the box or you could take an industrial sprayer and hit everything in the garage since that would probably get the box too. I'd choose the first option.

Filling voids is a legitimate application - I prefer less final approaches where possible, but that's a matter of personal choice more than anything else. Filling the space between the trunk exterior skin and the support ribs underneath makes sense. Filling the quarter panels, probably not.

Expanding foam has quite a few applications in a car but it isn't a substitute for vibration damper. You really need to use both - each where they are appropriate. Neither is a cure all for rattles. You need to track each one down and treat it - tighten things down, tape wires, foam between panels that touch, etc.

I'd definitely go with Second Skin Spectrum over eDead's liquids. Back when I was reviewing these products I looked at a variety of liquid products. I took a fixed liquid volume of each, weighed them then dried the samples and weighed them again to see how much of each was water. eDead had a very high water content. In terms of how much cured material you get per quart or gallon - the only thing you end up with, Spectrum is a better value. Spectrum is also a more modern and advanced formula. Just be aware that you need to apply these products in several coats, with drying time in between. You don't just "paint" the surface, you need to build up to about 2mm thickness for them to be effective.

If your rear seat backs fold down, try it with one side open and see if that helps.

You guys have designed systems that exceed your vehicle's ability to host them - too much pressure in too little space. The trunk lid seal is the path of least resistance for the pressure to escape. You either have to turn it down or make some drastic changes to reinforce the trunk. I'd reconsider the system design. What you're doing now is like running an air conditioner with the windows open.

No problem. Most cars don't need a lot of cleaning, by I always wipe everything down, even on new cars. No matter how clean a car is, inside the doors are usually filthy.

I like to use denatured alcohol - it's a more aggressive degreaser and it dries very quickly.

The rope is meant to be pushed into gaps between panels or panels and other parts. A perfect use in most cars is between the door exterior skin and the side crash intrusion prevention bars or structure. This basically turns the center of the exterior skin into a vibration damper. Add a few CLD Tiles and you are done. Another application is between the trunks outer skin and the support skeleton underneath. Stops rattling and damps vibrations. If you run a bead of it (you can stretch it into any thickness you want) around the perimeter of MLV installed on the inner door skin it turns it into a vapor shield - which you shouldn't need since you've sealed the access holes, right? Just e-mail me with what you want or what you are trying to do and I'll work out a shipped price. You can pay by PayPal or call me to order by credit card. I keep saying the shopping cart will be done any day now

Thanks guys - really appreciate it.

Multiple layers of any product isn't a great strategy - each layer after the first adds very little because it is really deadening the layer underneath it. Definitely seal the access holes. If you are using mounting rings or a baffle, extend it as much as possible to add rigidity to the inner skin. Both skins are equally important. It's a very good idea to slide vinyl tubing over actuator rods and then wrap them with foam. Tape down wires. Put a layer of closed cell foam between the inner skin and the door card to prevent buzzing. Put a layer of mass loaded vinyl or other barrier material over the closed cell foam if yo want to cut down on noise intrusion and to further isolate the fornt and back waves produced by door mounted speakers.

Thanks Aaron! All of that research and testing led up to a happy conclusion - you don't have to choose between getting a lot of cheap sound deadening or break the bank covering every square inch of your car with the good stuff. Find the best vibration damper you can, apply it at 25% coverage at the center of resonant panels and you are done with vibration damping. You've done less work, spent less money and made it possible to get to the vehicle's sheet metal if you need to do maintenance in the future. Win, win, win Understanding that basic principle allowed a few other things to happen. Since you are only working with the center 25% of any panel, large sheets of vibration damper just mean more work and cuts on your fingers and hands. Why not make the product in a convenient 6"X10" size? I did. Since you will seldom have to cut this stuff, it was possible to use a thicker foil. In theory, the ideal constrained layer vibration damper would use a constraining layer that is the same as the substrate being damped. Since that would require something like 22 gauge steel, it isn't really practical. Fact is, thick foil is very expensive, difficult to cut and press into irregular surfaces so the usually 3-4 mil thick foil is a compromise between performance and practicality. I stepped that up to 8 mil foil. You can still press it onto gently curved surfaces - like the exterior door panels, but the performance improvement is significant. There really is a better way to do this and it doesn't require layer after layer of material that performs poorly to get it done. Obviously there are a few other very good products out there. I'm not questioning their approach at all (although I think mine is better ). I do hope that this new effort will stop people from wasting their time and money on asphalt and low grade butyl flashing tapes. Aaron. thanks again for the kind words.

I'm not endorsing the practice, but most of the reports I've seen of improvement came from people installing these products in minimally deadened or completely untreated doors. In that case, the difference may be noticeable.

Seems they work on the ITD (initial time delay) which helps "clean" up the sound due to the acoustical phenomenon of diffusion. So even if the troughs are not at least 1/4 of the lowest frequency wavelength, it seems they can cause a shifting great enough to cause an overall audible response. CAE has some data on the effects of their product, and to me that's what looks like is going on. Plus we all know what happens when sound is shifted and shaped due to the negative effects of early reflections and odd order harmonics all bouncing around in a small space (ie a car). Maybe these pads turn that negative into inaudible? I don't know. Our friend Abmolech has argued that the claimed benefits for these things are completely false and impossible (maybe going as far as calling for prison time for the people selling them I'm willing to argue some things with him, but on a topic like this I absolutely defer. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence showing improvement, but in each case, I think the added mass and possible VE damping account for it all.

I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about creating a single piece barrier shell with multiple layers and no gaps or breaks. I wasn't talking about the the cheapest approach, rather the ideal barrier configuration. I've built none of these because it would be completely over the top, IMO. I get all of the performance I need from the commercially available stuff. Describing the ideal gives people something to think about. At what frequencies? Seems to me that the 1/4 wavelength rule is still going to apply. Even if one of these "diffusers" was 1/2" thick, it would only be effective at 6.8kHz and above.

Foam isn't going to do much in that application. If you have speakers mounted in the doors in the normal way, where the back wave hits the outer door skin, use a decoupled barrier, like Luxury Liner Pro, on top of your vibration damper.

With all of the bad behavior that some sound deadener companies can legitimately be called out for, I think some of the anger being expressed here is a little misplaced. Where to use vibration damper and where to use a barrier is a critical question when planning a project, but the swing toward barriers being the one true way is just as silly as claims that vibration damper alone is the solution to your problem

That may be true. Interestingly, when exactly the same products are sold for roofing use, the MSDS is freely distributed.

I'll look around to see if I made any notes on this, but I had the same problem with my Eclipse 8454 and Honda Civic. Matching the leads gave me a display that was either on or off, but didn't dim wit the rest of the dash illumination. I think you snipped the wrong wire. I think orange to orange w/ white stripe will give you what you want. I'll post back if I can find anything to confirm this. Mine does work properly now.

I just want to do a brief summary of my final thoughts on this thread. At some point it became too personal and I apologize to all for my role in that. FatMat went out of business and seems to have have screwed at least a few people on its way out. It also screwed quite a few people during the last year or two of existence by be dishonest about the composition of its product. SteveFatMat is now in charge. It certainly looks like he is a roofing materials supplier and I'm sure he knows a great deal about which roofing product is appropriate for which roofing application. The fact that he is selling roofing materials for automotive sound deadening doesn't imply he knows this application. Telling my I am wrong is one thing - and it happens all the time - but just saying it is far different that explaining or even suggesting why or how. His assertion that there are good and bad examples of product made from a variety of raw materials is accurate but it doesn't apply to this discussion. We have to assume that FatMat is rubberized asphalt since he has been very careful both not to say that it is and not to say that it is anything else. As useful as it may be for roofing and roads, asphalt is fundamentally unsuitable for sound deadening. Durability is a significant issue, regardless of quality. The interior of a car and its vertical and inverted surfaces are too hostile to rely on the adhesive qualities of asphalt. Sellers will always claim user error when the product fails, but I have seen no correlation between the care taken in application and the success of the project. I urge anyone who is uncertain about this claim to contact sundownz. He used to believe that application technique could produce a stable installation and by his description was almost compulsive about the care he took. He has changed his mind. Even if durability wasn't a problem, asphalt has several other problems. THe most important for our purposes is its non-elasticity. One of the ways vibration dampers dissipate energy is by deforming in reaction to the wave and then returning to its resting state, pulling back against the energy. This is the conversion to heat you hear about. Asphalt will deform in a much narrower temperature range than butyl, but it will not return to its original state - much less effective. I can't prove this yet, but through a great deal of hands on experience, I am absolutely convinced that butyl sound deadeners are so much more effective than asphalt that there is not reason at all to even consider using asphalt. Buying a smaller quantity of butyl mat with a decent foil facing and spreading it out will work as well or better than 2 o 3 times as much asphalt - there is just no reason to take the risks of asphalt. My initial battle with FatMat was bitter because they were lying about it being butyl. I'm glad that has been resolved. That doesn't make it a better sound deadener now that we are certain it is asphalt. I'm sure most of you noticed that SteveFatMat never said that FatMat wasn't Peal & Seal. Whether or nto it is that brand of product manufactured by MFM, it is indistinguishable from Peel & Seal. You'll also notice that he never even said. let alone provided any evidence that FatMat was in any way better as a sound deadener than Peel & Seal. Even if you think I am full of crap and have some irrational grudge or bizarre ulterior motive, if you are determined to use an asphalt product in your car, don't be a sucker - just go to Home Depot or the local roofing supply house. Sorry again that this got out of hand. I may have set a low standard for proof, but that just makes it easy for those who are trying to make money in this market to exceed my standard and educate the consumer about how and where their product works relative to the competition. SteveFatMat hasn't come close to that.

Steve, I'm not going to beat a dead horse. I don't know what typo you are upset about. The "Last Updated" date on a whois query has nothing to with renewals unless that was the activity that caused the registration data to change. It is updated every time any part of the registration data is "updated". Is it possible that a fully automated field like this could be populated with incorrect data? Sure. You aren't going to use the word asphalt and that's your prerogative. Not exactly the new openness you are proclaiming. Sorry if my pointing out the lies on your Web site and being told by your phone contact folks offends you in some way, but the "I'm a good guy and you're an asshat" approach isn't doing a lot to rehabilitate the FatMat name. Your tests show that FatMat is great stuff, but any details must be top secret. FatMat's success has been based entirely on deception. Your magic tests - done in a lab, not a kitchen! - don't encourage me that this has changed. Good luck to you, but don't expect people to line up to be kicked in the teeth. All I see is marketing hype with no substantiation and an apparent assumption that we are too stupid to know the difference.

I've Googled that to death. "Mastic" almost always refers to asphalt AKA bitumen. All of these asphaltic products have rubber compounds added to stabilize the asphalt. I give him points for putting a stop to the blatant lie, but unless we hear more from him, he loses some for choosing an indirect alternative. Still not to the "this is what it is and we are proud of it" level that would be nice to see. A little history might help. Back in the old days, competitors did extreme things like filling their vehicle's voids with concrete and applying tar to the vertical surfaces. They were willing to sacrifice any possible resale value for their goals. Dynamic Control came out with some products that are primitive by today's standards but were a big step up from home brewed solutions. After market sound deadening started to become mainstream. Many people, including Chris and Tammy McDaniel (not 100% sure on the names of this couple, but too lazy to confirm right now) wanted a piece of this market. They and others, like Elemental Designs, discovered that roofing products like Peel & Seal not only added mass to a panel, the fol protective layer increased their effectiveness somewhat and made them look like the newer products coming from Dynamic Control. This was their entire business model - buy Peel & Seal, wildly exaggerate it's capabilities and give it a new name. This also explains some of the almost funny anachronisms in the market. You can look at FatMat's site right now and see a description of its 1mil acrylic pressure sensitive adhesive. No such thing. The manufacturing process for these adhesive/foil laminates makes that impossible. Dynamat Original had a 1 mil acrylic PSA. They just appropriated that "feature" for their own use and it remains there to this day. When Dynamat Xtreme - butyl adhesive/foil laminate came out, it really moved this product sector into the mainstream. There was no longer any downside to sound deadening a vehicle. The other sellers needed to make a choice - either switch to the vastly superior but much more expensive butyl adhesive, stick with asphalt and pretend it was good or stick with asphalt and pretend it was butyl. Interestingly, the existence of asphalt products applied downward pressure on the prices of butyl products and the existence of butyl products allowed for greater markup of asphalt products. Profit margins are higher for the much cheaper asphalt mats and that is why some of these companies go to great lengths to either outright misstate the composition - FatMat on the Web site and ED when Ben Milne posted to forums, or use confusing terms that implied butyl - ED on their Web site. That's why this such a big deal and why I can be such a dick about it. You'll notice that none of these companies use deceptive terms if they also sell butyl products so it isn't just a case of generally imprecise tendencies. You'll also notice that the upstanding companies are very precise and tend to understate specs such as weight, thickness and heat tolerance. Unfortunately, people shouldn't have to make a study of this to find themselves a decent product.

Interesting. Do you have to ask at the time of purchase or can you purchase first and ask later. I ask because if the former is the case they can get around it by canceling your order and refunding your money - as they did in my case. It's sort of a moot point now. While SteveFatMat hasn't actually stated that FatMat is asphalt, he has said it isn't butyl, has removed the word from the sites and says nobody will claim it is butyl over the phone. That was my primary argument with them. The facts about how asphalt performs as a sound deadener, how stable it is, etc. speak for themselves and are the reasons the word "butyl" was put on the FatMat Web site in the first place. The exaggerated claims represent a battle we can't win. If they stick to the policy of not pretending FatMat is butyl, I'd expect the product to disappear pretty quickly because; If you are absolutely determined to use asphalt you can buy it at Home Depot less expensively You will get better results using much less butyl so it isn't even a useful compromise for economy FatMat's reputation is going to be a millstone around the neck of anybody who tries to use it