A quick LED Mod to my new Exile Cabin Speakers...

[ian ashton]

I ordered 3 pairs of SX65's from Brian (Great CS by the way! He even threw in some Meguairs detailer and a chammois!!!), and I wanted to jazz em up a little bit before I installed them. At some point I'll do LED speaker rings on all 6 and my towers, but I've got so many other projects planned that one had to wait. Anyway, I was playing around on eBay and bought a bunch of different style LED strips, basically to just see what they looked like, when I came across these. So, for $16 shipped I ordered 3 sets (6 strips.)



These are a little long, so I cut them down. You just have to make sure you cut in increments of 3 LEDs to keep the circuit complete.


Before: (So Sexy!)


So all I did was wrap the LED's around the cutout area lip thing for the tweeters. The LEDs have 3m adhesive on the back, and stick pretty darn good:

[ian ashton]

LEDs wrapped all the way around:


Next I just ran the power/ground wires along the inside of the grille, and used super glue to hold them in place. The Exile grilles are awesome for this, as they've got little channels that hide the wires completely, you can not see them from the front side:


After: (Notice, you can't see the wires, OR the LED strips, they are completely concealed behind the grille, I think that adds a layer of cool-ness;


This was taken with my iPhone when I was "testing" them before I actually trimmed and secured them into place, but you get the idea. I didn't get any good pics with my real camera. This was powering with a 9V battery, not sure if that has any impact on the brightness or not, but they are defiantely pretty bright. Should look pretty sweet!



So for $16 its not a bad little upgrade. I got all the grilles finished in about 30 minutes, now I just have to get them in the boat and re-wire all of my LEDs to the new switches.

[bergermaister]

I am SO copying you when I swap out my cabin speakers in the next month or so!

Thanks for the idea. I've been wondering the best way to go about doing this.

[viking]

Nice Mod Ian. Making sure they are hidden is the bomb! I'll be interested to see how the sticky tape holds up over the next season or 2.

[ian ashton]

I also super glued them at the seams, just in case

[dusty2221]

Looks great!

Seems similar to something I've seen....

[brain_rinse]

Cool idea! The LED rings look good at night but I don't care for the frosted spacer look during the day. I like the stealth mode of this mod... nice work.