# E46 Wagon - Sub in the tire well?



## SC300t (Aug 2, 2010)

Has anyone tried putting a sub or two in the compartment above the spare tire on an E46 Wagon?

It looks like you could just mount a sub to a baffle board and put a gasket around it sealing it from the weight of the board itself. Quasi sealed box. The box may be a tad leaky, but you'd be able to remove it easily. It looks like there is around 6" of depth, which isn't huge, and won't accomodate a 12" with a lot of depth, but a reasonable 10" or two 8" should work fine. I'd have bottom mount it, to accomodate for excursion. Any ideas for baffle board type? MDF would work but is heavy for something that size. It would be nice if they had something stiffer and lighter to work with.

I'm looking at doing this and perhaps adding a 5 channel amp and the BSW speaker upgrade.

Any impressions or ideas appreciated....

TIA

Scott Hureau
2001 E46 Wagon


----------



## orbitalgun (Sep 13, 2011)

*Sub in wheel well*

I think its a super idea. I put a custom box in the wheel pan that sits on top of the doughnut and it looks sharp. If I need to go on a long trip I can take both out and put in the full size spare. its perfect!
nick


----------



## ECSTuning (Feb 25, 2009)

If there is enough room for the sub to have a mounting plate you could put an infinite baffle sub down there and not have to worry about any leaking air. 

James


----------



## orbitalgun (Sep 13, 2011)

Im not sure what that is so I dont know but I can take a photo to give you an idea of what it looks like.


----------



## ECSTuning (Feb 25, 2009)

An infinite baffle sub is one which doesn't need a box per say. You can mount the face against a mounting plate and boom away. After thinking about it more, since you have a spare tire well if you remove the tire you could easily get a cubic foot or so of space which would be more than enough for a 10 or 12 inch normal sub woofer, which would be easier to tune and get a nice sound from. 

James


----------



## SC300t (Aug 2, 2010)

I got version 1.0 working in my 2001 E46 wagon. It ended up being a 3/4" MDF baffle / false floor. But I also put my amplifier on an MDF tray under the floor and had to make a rather elaborate concoction of support pieces on the side because the spare tire well really has lots of angles and shapes. I'm just using foam as a gasket around the areas. The sub is a sealed Infinity Perfect 12.1. Surprisingly there is room for such a large speaker. The original spare tire still exists. I calculated the internal volume at 2.5cu ft.

Version 1.1 will include a way to use the spare tire hold down nut in a way that holds and better secures the baffle / false floor better.

I'm just driving the sub with a small 2 channel 50w amp bridged. Probably around 150w mono. The amp is fed by a 5 band parametric EQ with boost around 30hz to counteract the roll off of the sub. Taking speaker level inputs directly to the amp didn't work well in my case, so I had to use a line level converter/driver type of device between the stock amp and the head unit. That routes the signal to the EQ. Driving the sub amp from the rear channels didn't work for me as the factory amp didn't like it and the amp would shut off. Could have been a floating ground issue with speaker terminals.

The rest of the system is stock. No trunk space is used aside from the small molded compartment over the spare tire. The line level converter sucks, and saps low bass response, so next step is to add something like an Audio Control EQX or JBL MS-8 processor that will better handle the output from the head unit. I also have my eyes on some JL audio XD series amps that will fit that small area in the well where my amp is located. As is, I get decent response down to around 25hz, rolling off below that.

When going this route, the factory door midbass and rear midbass drivers could use some high pass filtering to remove the bottom few octaves that the sub handles.


----------

