Surrey Off-Road Specialists Limited

So we had our star designer, cabinet maker and go-fer (me) on board, we now needed someone with technical know how on the electronics and acoustics front. My mate Kerry Hopwood who just happens to be a Record Producer, Music Director and studio designer/builder amongst his various talents, had just finished an album, and was up for doing something different for a change. He had been involved from day one with advice when I was planning, he was now itching to get involved and didn’t need any encouragement at all. We had our team and got stuck in.

After some discussion over suitable timber to use, the decision was made to use Sycamore and then stain dark grey (to match the interior). We did some test pieces that looked spectacular, with the staining bringing out the flaming in the wood. It looked great! The original plan was that we would give Alan some drawings to build to and he would make the stuff in his workshop. However that fell over at the first attempt, we couldn’t design sections without Alans knowledge of wood grains, warping, expanding and contracting and just what you could and more importantly couldn’t do with wood generally. So the plan had to change. I have got an incredibly ugly huge ex aerodrome LDV tail lift Luton van. We converted that into a mobile workshop for Alan to work in on site.

We simply backed it up to the workshop bay and he would wander to and fro as needed. The design whilst basically following Henry’s drawings, simply evolved as it went along. The first job was to completely strip the interior out and line the whole shell with the excellent Dynamat Extreme sound deadening.

We then filled all of the body cavities and plastic mouldings with expanding foam, the idea being to reduce the chances of resonance and panel vibration inside the pillars etc.

80 lbs!! of Dynamat and 6 cans of expanding foam later, the shell made a reassuring dull thud if you rapped your knuckles on it.

Whilst we were doing the shell, Alan was fabricating the front consoles to house the centre speakers for the surround sound in the middle top of the dash, the monitor and CD head unit in the middle of the dash and the control unit for the H900 at the bottom centre of the dash.

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