So I've invested about $250...

[D-Rat]

...and a fair amount of time.

After reading every post in this forum and many others, I decided how I was going to do my stereo, and I did it on the cheap. I'm thrilled with how it sounds. It drowns out the big 400 even with the loud pedal applied, so I'll declare this mission a success. Bass is reasonably good given the fact there's just the two speakers.

I found a Pioneer 50w x4 CD player at Wally World on closeout for $100, and a set of Pioneer 4way 6x9s to go with it for abot $70 more.

Add the following:

$30 universal head unit mount from Best Buy,
$50 for a sheet of 0.090 wall aluminum - I maybe used about 1/4 of the sheet, so we'll call that $12.50
$5 for a can of spray paint,
$2 for 12 feet of speaker wire
$25 or so for various weather stripping, screws, some 1x1 wood, and a roll of electrical tape.
$6 for the 3 cutoff wheels I used up cutting the aluminum

My interior on my '70 is real nice and unmolested, so I wanted to keep it that way. The AM radio works, and there have never been speakers in the doors, so I wanted this stereo to go in and still have the ability to return things to original.

Conventional 6x9 speaker boxes were too big, so I needed something made of thin and light material that would fit on the door. So I went with aluminum. It took a good solid day to cut all the pieces, assemble, and paint the boxes. The back piece is bent at angles...that was the toughest part considering I only had a vise, a block of wood, and a couple big C clamps to do the bending with, and all cuts were done freehand with a 4 1/2" angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. All that considered, I think they turned out OK. Surprisingly, they're not that intrusive on the interior legroom of the truck.

So anyways, I didn't take pics of the raw materials on the boxes, but here's some pics starting after they had a coat of paint on them and were being assembled. My jig saw worked well for cutting out the speaker holes.







The two mounting holes use the front two bottom door panel screws. I did replace the OEM screws with some slightly longer cap screws and used blue loctite to keep them from vibrating loose. You can see the mounting holes in this shot.



The Pioneer speakers. Thse have a mounting depth of 3 1/16". The boxes are just about as thin as they can be.



Here's the speakers mounted in the front plates:


Here's some raw materials to remove any rattles or tinny sound quality.