I spent a couple hours last night modifying some ebay speaker "cones" and installing Kicker speakers into them. My on and off again stereo upgrade had stalled for a while I attended to the trifecta, building a new shed, etc., but the boxes had been sitting in my dining room in the "X5 shipping and receiving area" for too long and I finally got to it last night.
Nothing groundbreaking here as I followed Chrystalwork's excellent posted instructions, advice and lessons learned closely. I don't plan on dragging new speaker wire around the car like he did though (will use OE speaker wires as much as possible) and already have a powered 10" sub in the left rear cubby that sounds fantastic (no OE sub in my car).
The rear speakers are 6.5" 2-way Kickers and the fronts are 6.5" component Kickers, with the tweeters going into either the pilar locations or the dash locations, whichever is easier to install and wire up. I realize I'm losing the small mid in the rear door, and one tweeter or mid up front, but I think the quality will be so much better than OE (and 20-year-old OE at that), that a non-audiophile like me will appreciate a bit easier install and much better sound and not notice the missing speakers.
Speaker enclosures came from ebay and popping the OE speakers out was fairly easy with a mat-knife and some force. I ground the mounting ears off the Kickers with a belt sander, vacuumed up all the shavings that stuck to the magnetized parts of the speakers, and test fit each into the enclosures. Each door has a specific enclosure, but the PN stickers were still on each used piece. A qick reference to RealOEM made sure I was putting the correct speaker into the correct front/back enclosure. I plan on using the OE plugs/wiring so "clocked" the connection points relatively close to each other. I stupidly got a bit wrapped up worrying about OE wire colors, + and/or -, but then realized I can just make brown - and the other color +...which is probably what BMW did anyway.
Some 3m double sided tape around the enclosure lip went down to hold the speaker and cusion it, then a drop of Gorilla super glue gel at each of the ground-down attach points (which touch the sides of the enclosures) went on. After that dried a bead of 3M Black weatherstrip and gasket adhesive filled in the gap between the speakers and enclosures. This stuff flows very nicely into the gaps where the speaker edges don't fit exactly into the enclosures.
All in all not a bad job, especially with an old fashioned within reach. I need to buy the Kenwood amp I plan on using in the next month or so (a very compact 4 channel 4 ohm, 70 watt/channel amp and fashion a bracket, or modify the existing amp bracket in the left cubby. Then I can take a day or two and finish the installation once I have all the prep work done and parts on hand. I ran RCA cable overhead from the Kenwood receiver to each cubby last year when the headliner was out, so I'm hopeful I can avoid unwanted interference noise buy going overhead. The Kicker powered sub is plugged in and sounds very clean.
3M tape is the way to go. Forgot it on the first one and hope I don't have any plastic on plastic vibrations.
Kickers came with speaker wire and connectors on one end, and I'll trim the wires to length and solder the other end to the enclosure posts.
I think the component tweeters and these crossovers will be a challenge. The crossovers may need to go back by the amp, if I'm to use the existing speaker wires at the front tweeter locations.
