Hey guys,Have a pretty exciting announcement for yall.About a month ago, we officially added a new member to the Simplicity In Sound family! Julia has been in the industry for a while, working as an installer and fabricator; her current SN on diyma is "innovative sound" but will soon become " [email protected] ". We hope to take her existing knowledge in metal working and general fabrication and infuse it with our own know-how and experience and create some kind of monster super duper female installator extradinaire!Anyway, with us being so busy, there was no initialization period, she got thrown directly into the deep end on this 2008 Mercedes C350 for a simple active SQ build. She performed virtually all the work and fabrication on the vehicle with some gentle guidance from Joey and I. What better way to introduce our newest team member than a build log of her first project!Please keep in mind that it will take her sometime to get used to how many and where to snap all the pics during the build, so this particular log may be somewhat scarce compared to my usual shenanigans. heheonto the goals:1. achieve a decent level of overall sound quality improvement fro the oem stereo2. integrate a customer supplied ipod dock that links to the dsp via a digital output module3. keep the trunk 100 percent oem lookingso lets get startedFirst thing on the car for her was to fabricate a metal fuse holder, and she did a simple beam, tapped and locates a single stinger mini anl fuse holder using the factory bolts:here is the holder after painting:next up was the ipod/phone docking station which will act as a secondary signal source in addition to the stock headunit. The customer wanted the piece integrated into the factory ashtray area, but still be able to hide it out of view when not in use. So here is the normal view of the area, which is 100 percent stock:slide the tray door back and here is what you see, a plate with a precisely cutout opening to fit an i-device, along with two knobs populate the area. one knob goes to a Mosconi 4to6SP-Dif DSP and acts as master volume, while the second knob is a remote bass level adjuster.here is a test iphone 5 plugged into the dock:A Final look at the center console area, show the motorized oem display:here are a few quick build pics of the holder/tray:here is the area before any mods:then Julia took a piece of thin black ABS, marked the shape to be cut out:and then trimmed it out with a router. here you see the plate with the customer supplied dock:here is the roughly cut plate ontop of the dock:after some additional sanding and trimming, the combined piece was painted black:and then fitted to the astray assembly:here you see the two knobs secured in place:Moving onto the front stage, which is a set of Focal 165FX FLAX cone drivers. the tweeters were installed into the oem sail panel location, here you see the flax tweeter in one of them, with the oem tweeter in the other:after both tweeters were secured, the oem foam piece went back on and the sails went back onto the vehicle:Julia then turned her attention to the doors. the door panel received a liberal coverage of STP cld damper, and a new pair of speaker wires were run into the door:then Julia created a spacer by match routing the oem speaker basket:the spacers were then coated with several layers of truck bedliner to protect them against the elements:then the spacers were bolted back on using oem locations and the focal flax midbasses installed:the same procedure was repeated on the passenger side:while the outter door cards also got some CLD damper:Julia then ran the wire bundles from the front to the back, but the only pics she took was at the back seat (as the bundles were otherwise inside a factory channel and carpet), but they are ziptied and organized neatly throughout:here is a picture of the soldered connections at the oem amp's output plug that provides the signals needed:so tahts it for the interior, Julia also removed the rear deck subwoofer and speakers to gain additional venting into the cabin.onto the trunk, as mentioned, the idea is to look 100 percent oem normally, so here is that view, as you can see, nothing has changed