Vibe Subwoofer and Amp Box Fitted

I'd been after a subwoofer for a while when an excellent opportunity presented itself.

A friend of mine needed some cash and wanted to sell his Vibe CBR12 Evo II subwoofer and amp combo. It had much more power than I wanted at 600W RMS and 1600W peak. I'd previously been looking at building my own enclosure and sticking a 150-200W sub in there.

To make sure I got the most out of the thing I needed a pretty hefty wiring kit.

I checked around and finally decided on a 4 gauge Autoleads 1200W kit from eBay at £25 posted, pretty good deal in my opinion.

I decided I wanted to position the fuse within the fuse box of the car, this meant a little tweaking but would be much neater job than attaching it to the engine bay somewhere.

I offered up the fuse to check it would fit and found a nice spot to locate it.

There was already a slot for one end of the cable to exit but the other end would need it's own slot creating. Luckily there was a tab exactly the right size that could be removed for cable to slot into. Using a hand saw I soon sorted that out, to finish I used a round file to get a nice shape.

With the fuse in place it was time to start routing all the wiring through the cabin, First up was the RCA and remote cable, shown below poking out of the headunit aperture.

All wires were run along the sides of the car underneath the carpet, the RCA and remote on one side and the power the other side to avoid interference. The wires then came together under the rear seat bench carpet, I used a little Gaffa tape to secure them neatly. From there I fed them up into the boot where the sub would be situated.

Another bonus to this subwoofer was an accessory my mate had included, a Vibe Fast Plug. This invaluable little gadget meant the subwoofer could be removed at any time quickly and easily. This was crucial to my install as I do sometimes make use of the whole boot, and removing the sub would be necessary.

Wiring it in was simple; all of the wires from the headunit and battery go into one side of the plug, then using off cuts join the other side up to the sub from the other half of the plug.

Due to the radius of the connector supplied on the positive cable, I couldn't just attach it to the terminal. I managed to source a bolt that fit the threaded hole in the top of the connector. This actually worked out neater and a better connection anyway.

Finally, to neaten up the engine bay, I added the plastic OE looking covers provided with the wiring kit. As the car's red and the leads were blue they stuck out like a sore thumb so I was keen to cover them up. Both cables were covered, however only one is shown in the pictures.

The sub box originally comes ported, I would have preferred it not to be due to the type of sound I was after. Helpfully, my mate came up trumps again with the Vibe Port Plug. Another simple solution, just a foam plug that fits snug in the port. Surprisingly it makes a lot of difference, it can be heard clearly just by pulling it out when the sub is working.

Everything in, time to enjoy the music. Needless to say it makes a huge difference to the sound quality of the system. Wound right up this sub shakes the car, making the rear view mirrors a waste of time...excellent.