2001 Cadillac Escalade EXT

Here's Jeff's truck, riding on 26" wheels which received lots of attention from customers.  This truck had plenty of time to get attention too, we had to "sit on" the truck for the first few months we had it because we were moving from our first store in Suite D to the larger (current 4400 square foot) facility.  'more like an operating room in the case of Jeff's truck.  Removing the previous work revealed all sorts of surprises, like:

Like a parking brake cable that had been cut.  When the previous "installer" or hobbyist installed their "custom" kick panels, (featured in graphic detail below), they must have figured that the parking brake cable must be cut in order to make their dealeo's fit in the kick panel area properly.

I'm not an animal, I am a man, says the ugly kick panel.  It's the Elephant Kick Panel. Ohmigosh, it's a likeness of Dumbo.  I sound like I'm being harsh, but I do have a tender spot in my heart for the artist.  I too was once building stuff like this, 'back in the late 70's, early 80's in the VERY beginning.  We all started somewhere, hopefully this guy stuck with it and starting building some better looking stuff that also will hold up better over time.  I like to think that even at many years into the industry (more than I'd like to mention) I feel that I still work toward mastery of many things of done many times before.  I'm more picky than many, and I believe that I can only approach the wear and tear qualities of a quality oem supplier.  Look at the obvious investment in tooling by GM, Ford, Honda, whomever, and the panels and finishes they create.  The biggest test of any of this stuff, (and it's mostly freehand fabrication, mostly created by one man's hands), is how well it holds up to daily use and abuse.  Daily use by people using the vehicle as it was intended to be used.  I do wish I had a picture ('sounds like a line...) of the new kick panels, they were surely the nicest I've personally ever made.  I remember some early ones entirely of wood, that's where I learned firsthand that an overdamped speaker lacks any kind of bass or even lower midrange in dramatic cases.  'Too small of a chamber behind the driver acts like an overly forceful "spring" holding the speaker cone in place.  A box that is too small also increases power handling of a speaker, helps "control" the cone, but will  also reduce the overall efficiency of a speaker.

Here's a shot of the A pillar trim, where they had mounted tweeters previously.  This shows relative inexperience with using body filler.  I feel lucky to have spent some of my grunt days (about 3.5 years full time total) working at Lamperti Bros. Auto Body in South San Francisco, while in last couple of years of High School and just after that with Custom House Auto Reconstruction in San Mateo.  Lots of sanding, prep, and perhaps most importantly, the lessons in how much the prep work affects the final product, once it's been shot with color and clearcoat.  In some cases I was wetsanding most of the panels on a freshly painted and clear'ed Jaguar XJ6, sometimes it was a factory warranty repaint we performed for the local Burlingame dealer, Cole European on California Drive.  The grunt work was repetitive but helped build the physical skills as well as mental ones.  The finished products were flawless mirrored finishes, highly polished and with a urethane clearcoat, a big deal in the early and mid 80's.  Matt and Steve also have many projects under their respective belts, which resulted in some clean, long lasting custom work in this truck.

I'm proud to present to you, the work of Steve, one of our master installers.  This guy is fun to work with and he is as "seasoned" as they come.  He's worked on many thousands of cars with all types of configurations, lots of custom work and quality boxes.  Here you got some more freehand work, but Steve worked hard in the primer stages to really smooth things out, build up material for aesthetics, and he knew what it would take to get it to look really good and last a long time.  As you can see he color-matched the grill.  He did the same thing I did on the kickpanels, we each used the high quality interior paint that is exact oem color matched, and it can easily be touched up (some light prep and resprayed) again and again.  I figured the kickpanels that I built would be kicked and become scuffed over time, so a high quality gloss finish would look much worse scuffed and be more hassle to repaint.  The floorpods for the C5 Corvette (see Rachel's page) and in my BMW were the same finish.  It looks like a factory interior.  All three of these vehicles employed a Focal 3-way Polykevlar set of components.  We placed two additional TN52 Focal tweeters in this vehicle, which wasn't difficult because of our choice to run active crossovers.  (Ohm loads change frequency on passive crossover networks, and alter characteristics from the painstakingly designed crossover networks you're connecting them to.)  We knew we could get 12 dB per slope and accuracy with an offboard Audio Control Equalizer.  I think we used an EQS.

Jeff's sweet truck has a supercharger, which was done right before we stored it for the upcoming installation.

Here are the nice new Vizualogic headrest monitors, replacing the Cadillac headrest but still embroidered with the Cadillac logo and oem quality.