what kind of fleece?

I will be fiberglassing my dashboard with a friend.  The only kind of fleece i can find only stretches 1 way.  He says i need to get the kind that stretches both ways, but i cant find it anywhere.  Ive tried all the local fabric stores. Only spot i havent checked is with a car audio store but they probably dont want to sell me a yard of it. Wht should i do?

I generally use spandex or whatever cheap, thin, stretchy material I can find at the dollar store. Fleece has too much fuzz that you just end up sanding off.

It isn't really anything special. I just use a lightweight polyester fleece. I would expect your local fabric shop to have some. You just need a material that will be able to stretch over the enclosure and give you the shape you want. It doesn't need to stretch that much either so what you are looking at may be okay. I get the thinnest fleece I can get. You don't use the fleece for strength just to get the shape you want so I use a thin fleece to waste less resin. Don't get anything with cotton in it or it will stretch once you put resin on it. I always get 100% polyester fleece and it always works well.

The scrap fabric pile has indifferent types of poly cloths that will hold for the first coat.This is what I do for FUN!

i dont use fleece, never have. im not exactly sure when people started using fleece anyway. i always use nylon. reinforce from the inside, not the outside. (cant figure out why people do that either, just makes for way more work than needed).

ok, I might just try the piece i got then.  Another question somewhat related to this.  I had planned on mounting my component set on the face of the dash, aiming at me.  My buddy, who is a professional installer says to put them near the factory locations shooting up at the windshield.  I said ok, i'll try that but when i try to place them in there, there is no way for them to fit because there is a piece of firewall in the way, and i dont want to cut it.  So now i'm thinking of the original plan, and putting them on the face aimed at me.  This should still sound good right? I've seen cars at sbn like this and they seemed to work.  Truck is a 1992 chevy reg cab.  I got no glove box and guage pod now, will b making flat piece go all the way across to mount my autometer guages and tach.

facing at you is the ideal location for all high frequency speakers, although depending how close to you they are it could be a big issue with getting the tuning right for your sound stage, i would recommend your bases stay in the doors or kick panels. and your high freqs go in the dash anything 4" or smaller can work there and considering you already are building a new dash location is your choice. i wouldnt put anything facing a windscreen, will get reflection which is very unideal. if yourve ever seen a theater youd notice all the walls are sound deadened well in your car in a perfect world all walls would be sound deadened, obviously you cant do this to your windscreen, so you try and find other ways around this. the only reason to keep the factory position of facing the windscreen is for ease.

bellsracer wrote: If you do need the cloth to stretch 2 ways, I use unbacked automotive carpet. It can stretch in multiple directions and is typically made of polyester so it will make a perfect chemical bond to most resins.

I have not heard of doing that before. It seems like it would work okay except I wouldn't think it would work well for complex shapes.

ckeeler wrote: i dont use fleece, never have. im not exactly sure when people started using fleece anyway. i always use nylon. reinforce from the inside, not the outside. (cant figure out why people do that either, just makes for way more work than needed).

I need to try that sometime. I have never used nylon before so I will give it a try next time I fiberglass.

mattb561 wrote: ok, I might just try the piece i got then.  Another question somewhat related to this.  I had planned on mounting my component set on the face of the dash, aiming at me.  My buddy, who is a professional installer says to put them near the factory locations shooting up at the windshield.  I said ok, i'll try that but when i try to place them in there, there is no way for them to fit because there is a piece of firewall in the way, and i dont want to cut it.  So now i'm thinking of the original plan, and putting them on the face aimed at me.  This should still sound good right? I've seen cars at sbn like this and they seemed to work.  Truck is a 1992 chevy reg cab.  I got no glove box and guage pod now, will b making flat piece go all the way across to mount my autometer guages and tach.

You should read the stickies about setting up a front stage. It will tell you exactly how to set up your speakers for best performance. The stickies are here....