Lexus IS250

Eric brought his new Lexus IS 250 to us from the SF Bay Area.  After viewing our website and sending us an email, we talked with Eric about his car and he was willing to drive 2 hours to drop off his car at our shop. 

Man what a great looking car!  Eric told us that he'd dreamed about having a really nice system since high school, and now he had the right car and he was ready.

Here is a picture showing the subwoofer enclosure trim panel without the sub box in place.  This gives you an idea of how the dampening mat looks when applied, well okay, plastered, all over the interior sheet metal of the car.  We dampened all 4 doors, the roof, the floor, and the inside of the trunk including the quarter panels.  The interior was completely stripped of carpet, seats, console and trim while we worked.  Charlie did a majority of the work including the custom fabrication in the trunk area.  The rest of the crew installed the Hertz 3 way component speakers in each of the 4 doors, that's two sets of High Energy 3-way component speakers!

Here is the trunk after Charlie finished.  There is a CAI logo embossed in the floor panel, which covers the original floor panel and allows unimpeded access to the spare tire.  The 3 JL Audio amplifiers are on the right side, a pair of 300/2 amps to run the two component sets and a 500/1 to run the newly introduced JL Audio 13TW5 shallow 13.5" subwoofers.  Eric wanted these slick new subs which allowed us to make a relatively shallow box front to back and displace less air volume than most heavy duty subwoofers.  On the left side of the trunk you can see the Stinger Hybrid 15 Farad power capacitor, which distributes power to the amplifiers via Audison cables including 1/0 gauge cable to the dry cell battery.

Here is our bro Charlie sanding, sanding, then sanding some more.  In order for the box to show properly through the clear acrylic window when illuminated, the interior of the box really has to be free from flaws.  After several applications of high build primer and body filler to smooth out all interior walls and corners, it's finally ready for a nice reflective paint.  Soon Charlie will have his fingerprints back.

Here is a photo showing the maze of wiring for the JL Audio Cleansweep interface that allows us to provide clean signal from the factory headunit with 24 bits of resolution and 8 volts for the JL Audio amplifiers.  The fan helps keep the amps from overheating in the custom rack that Charlie built.  You can see the protective plastic wrap film that protects the car's paint while we spend mucho time working in the trunk.

And here is the final product, illuminated.  The edgelit acrylic amp rack actually looks better in person.  The sub enclosure interior is lit, and the Stinger cap matches.  The photo doesn't do it justice.  Eric was soooo happy when he picked up his car which made us all feel great.  Thank you Eric for waiting patiently while we worked on your car with love.  We're delighted to add your car to the show cars section of our installation pages here!  Thanks guys, and especially Charlie for all of the hard work.  This car sounds as good as it looks, and that's saying a lot!