Insight shoebox subwoofer installation

So I’ve already replaced the door speakers, radio and added rear speakers. Now for the final phase.
So last sunday I finally got around to installing the subwoofer I had ordered for my Honda Insight. Specifically it’s called the John Wayland Shoebox subwoofer. Long story short, it’s a custom subwoofer made by a guy for the Honda Insight. The entire thought behind the whole process is to add bass without subtracting space…a stealth mod if you will.
There are 3 main parts. The subwoofer (with speaker), the amplifier, and the mounting bracket for the amplifier. Sounds easy enough right?
Anyways back to the installation, the following is my account of how the installation went and the problems encountered. Due to the number of pictures and lenght of this article, you will have to click the continue below button to read more….

Alright, first thing’s first. The project took me about 6 hours I’d say, or most of my Sunday. Keeping in mind I dragged my butt on this project to make sure I did everything right, plus I used the opportunity to clean out my car a bit first.
My initial goal was to get everything together that I would need. Soldering gun, zip ties, heat shrink tubing, tools, wiring kit, split loom tubing, tools, etc… The only thing I had to buy that John Wayland couldn’t provide was the power/audio wiring kit. I simply picked up a rockford fosgate one on the web that had everything except a 2nd set of RCA cables.
Thankfully I had just cleaned out the garage, so for the first time in my life I had pretty much all the room I could ever need.

So now that I had everything pretty much in the area ready, I did the first thing needed. I took the passenger seat out, and let me tell you. Those back bolt’s are a nightmare to remove. The front bolts are no big deal, but the back ones use thread lock to secure them because they go thru the chassis and are exposed to the outdoors. I literally had to use all my strength to get them off and even wear gloves to I could put more pressure.

Once you’ve completed that little slice of heaven, the only thing left is to remove the seat belt using a 14mm socket. Nothing amazing about that. Next I moved on to the rear compartment, my goal being to remove all the necessary parts from the car before installing everything. So I removed the back carpeting and storage compartment to gain access to the plate that needed to be removed. Once there I removed 3 plastic fasteners (they look like phillips, but really aren’t…but if your lucky, a precision phillips head will remove them) and two bolts (I think 10mm). Of course you have to pop off the 2 plastic carpet fastners. Once that was done I eyeballed the line to cut off the plate, and used a dremel with a cutting wheel. Nothing amazing about it, pretty easy to do.

After the angle was cut I moved back into the main cabin to get myself access to the rear of the stereo for the RCA connections. Also gave me a lot more room to work with for the speaker and power connections later on. I recommend you remove the glovebox and center console. Instructions on how to do it can be see here.

After that, I screwed the Amp to the retention plate provided by Mr. Wayland and did a dry test fit to see how it looked.

My next step was to make a path for the wire to travel to the subwoofer from the amplifier. I chose to remove the side panel completely, it just seemed easier to me.

My next goal was to run the power line. Now admittedly I went a little overkill with 8awg wire, but better safe than sorry in my opinion. Of course that made running it thru the firewall a nightmare, only complicated further by the fact that I was alone and running wire alone is not a happy task. After trying to brute force it thru, and even trying to enlarge/create a starter hole I ended up using a foot of stiff wire lying around and electrical taped it to the wire. This worked out best in my opinion. I recommend you just use this method from the get go and save some time. Once I was thru the firewall and rubber boot I simply ran enough up to reach the battery and left it to come back to it later (I was waiting to get smaller split loom tubing that a friend dropped off later).

The next part was the most fun. Wiring. Basically it was running all the wires to the amp and making them look pretty. I ended up cutting like an inch off both sides of the while plastic runner’s to make them fit. Just easier that way. Honestly, if you doing this yourself, you should already know how to run the wires and what’s entailed so i’m not going to go into detail here. The only tip I have is use black zip ties if you have them

Now that the wiring is completed, let’s readdress the power issue shall we? By now my friend had stopped buy with his ungodly role of split loom tubing that was just perfect for the wire. I was able to get that situated after a little fighting with the red boot on the battery cover. It isn’t the prettiest thing you’ll ever see in your life but it works. Here you can see the before and after.

Of course the seat fit fine, so after tightening down the screws I took some pictures so show the final product. Nice and covert, you can’t see thing from outside the car. But you can still reach everything if you want to without much trouble at all. Although, if you want to adjust anything you need a long handled precision flat head screwdriver. I won’t bother going into details on my settings because everybody’s gonna be different.

Final thoughts:
The system definitely was designed and built with quality. The price was steep, I won’t lie, but honestly if your gonna do it, do it right. The performance of the bass is pretty much the best you could hope for and very impressive for it’s size. I did choose to run my front’s off the amp as recommened, and do think it was worth the rewiring as opposed to using the head unit to drive them. However, I did leave the rears to be powered off the head unit.
Speaking of head unit’s…make sure your’s has rear and front preouts, or at least front and subwoofer one’s. Splitting a rear preout to feed both destroys the signal quality and introduces engine noise like you wouldn’t believe.
Also thanks to Jim Holmgren for his picture gallery which helped me prepare for the work I was going to do.