A warning for lady readers! Would you let your boyfriend and his mates loose on your lovely new Hyundai ?

Probably not, right… But what if the end result was this eyeball dazzler that pumps out 147Db and which has also scored 32 on the RTA scale?

Tammy Prince might not have liked the idea in the first place, but she sure doesn’t mind all the attention now.

And get this - it only took four weeks for Mitchell Kelly and his mates, Darryl Harrington and Mathew Lloyd, to turn this ‘99 model hatchback from a stocker into what you see here.

The plan was hatched when Mitch and the boys heard about the ‘99 Western Salon and figured they’d have a go. It should be explained though, that Mitch, Tammy, Darryl and Mathew live in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia’s gold mining capital.

Beer, bar room brawls and a quickie down Hay Street on Saturday night are the more usual exploits in Kal’, so deciding to do something like this in four weeks before embarking on a 1500km round trip to Perth and back is no small undertaking.

Incidentally, the car was driven to Perth and back with all the gear on board and four humans both ways !!

Talk about dedication.

And it must be yellow…
When the project got under way and Tammy was ‘converted’ to the idea, it was decided to stay away from wild bodykits and simply turn the volume up in regards to the colour yellow.

There’s not much need for bodykits on mining equipment and 4WDs out Kalgoorlie way, and the custom work involved in fitting a kit was out of everyone’s sphere of expertise.

And there were only four weeks to the show, remember.

The yellowing process was therefore applied to the wing mirrors, door handles, side mouldings .... if they could have we’re sure Mitch and the boys would have yellowed the sidewalls on the tyres.

Although not wanting the time and hassles of a bodykit, some exterior refinements were performed.

A conversion to a single windscreen wiper is one, while the bonnet scoop is from a Nissan Patrol. Series III Commodore front blinkers were also added, but these and the single wiper became a little troublesome.

"The blinkers had to be cut on the inside to fit and there was a lot of stuffing around with linkages to make the single wiper work," Mitch conceded.

Ian Diffen’s store in Kalgoorlie then came to the party with a set of 15" Speedy rims and a Genie exhaust system, while WA Suspensions in Perth sent a set of lowered Kings springs (guess what colour they are ..) out to Kal’ on the overnight courier.

One of the more subtle exterior touches are the custom ‘eyelids’ for the headlights, made up from a second hand Hyundai bumper bar.

The car was now yellowed out, lowered and wheeled, but what about the interior?

A touch more yellow paint, matching pedals and a steering wheel, not to mention checker plate floor mats, were only the beginning. Look closely and you’ll see that the stock seats have yellow pinstriping around their edges.

A small detail touch, true, but effective.

Hear that? I SAID, DID YOU…
Oh, did we mention the sound system yet?

"I had a massive amount of sound gear that I was about to install into a Toyota Landcruiser," explained Mitch, "but then we got started on Tammy’s Hyundai and, well, here’s the result ...!"

The full list of equipment is impressive and right from the start it was decided that every last component which was scheduled for the ‘Cruiser would instead be added into the little yellow Korean.

There was to be no picking and choosing, no deliberating - everything was going in.

So, after nutting it all out and calculating all the figures, the end result is 60 inches worth of subwoofers, a little over 2,000 Watts RMS for the complete system and more front fill than Pamela Anderson (at least before her recent and ‘sad’ reconstructive surgery...)

The system is headed up by Alpine’s CDA-7939E single CD player / tuner, chosen mainly for its dual 4 Volt pre-outs.

Don’t bother asking about a TV unit though. Like many others these days, this Kalgoorlie gang have had enough of the ‘obligatory’ CV-whatsit !

The two pre-outs from the 7939E are fed into a two-channel Kicker ZR 1000 amp and a three channel Alpine MRV 1505.

The latter is the only amp hidden from view, tucked away underneath the two fully sealed 28 litre boxes that house those monstrous S15D Kicker subs.

The MRV 1505 powers three dual voice coil JL Audio 10W6 subs, which are wired to produce the maximum rating of 900 Watts RMS at 14 Volts.

Not surprisingly, the MRV 1505 has been set up with a 100Hz low pass.

The ZR 1000 Kicker amp meanwhile, carries an SWX interchangeable crossover module, set with an 80 Hz low pass and a 100Hz high pass.

The low pass equates to those two S15D subs, each of which has its own dedicated channel from the ZR 1000.

As such, it’s only 250 Watts RMS either side, with each sub presented as a 4-Ohm load.

The 100Hz high pass from the ZR 1000 meanwhile, transfers through to a two channel Kicker ZR-360 amp for front fill.

The 14 speakers that the ZR-360 amp has to power (yes, 14!) might seem a little excessive, but then that was the general idea when Mitch and his cohorts embarked on their crazy mission.

"Each channel of the 360 is pumpin’ 200 Watts RMS into 1-Ohm stereo loads," explained Mitch.

"It does get a little warm, but just keeps on kickin’!"

Simply the best – by any means
Preparation work for the placement of all these front speakers saw plenty of sound deadening applied to the car, even if it came from a somewhat unusual source.

"There was this new nightclub being built in Kal’ and I knew some of the people who were working on it," explained Darryl Harrington.

"They had some of this studio sound proofing left over and I managed to do a deal for it. Expensive shit, but it works brilliantly."

The MDF based door build outs comprise two sealed boxes, one housing the two 6.5" Kicker mid bass speakers and the other associated with the DD Drive 6.5" and DD Drive 5.5" splits in each door.

Mathematicians out there will of course have it sussed by now that six speakers in each door does not add up to the above mentioned total of 14 speakers for the entire front fill.

"We added the additional two tweeters on either side of the steering wheel because it was something different to do", explained Harrington.

"They’re wired in with the 6.5" splits on either side and amazingly, the staging and imaging at the front works really well. I think the RTA score of 32 proves a point too!"

Nonetheless, the positioning of these extra tweeters required a touch of rearranging.

"There’s a blank position on the right of the steering wheel, but we had to move the de-mister switch on the left down next to the bonnet release," Mitch explained.

Out back and MDF was used extensively for the sealed enclosures housing all the subs.

In addition to the combined 56 litres for the two 15s, a total of 45 litres was used for the three DVC 10s.

Obviously, the back end of a Hyundai hatchback is bigger than we thought!

Incidentally, if you’re looking at the photos and can only see two JL 10"s, the third lies flat on the floor of the boot in front of the two Kicker amps.

Built quickly, but with care
Although put together in somewhat of a hurry, Mitch and the boys still managed to apply plenty of thought and foresight to their, er, Tammy’s project.

Three 4-gauge power cables run from the battery (the only one in the car too, by the way), through the inner guard and up the chassis to the boot with each amplifier on a separate circuit breaker.

Not one hole has been cut in the car and the amps are actually earthed through the anchorage points for the rear seat belts.

The amplifiers can also be turned on and off by a bank of switches in front of the handbrake, thus allowing the front fill to be ‘shut down’ for SPL contests when dedicated bass is required.

It’s a handy feature for a degree of system tuning too.

Another neat touch is that the sound system can be activated by a ‘secret’ switch connected through the ignition wiring.

This allows the sound to be cranked without the ignition key in place, thus offering a certain amount of vehicle security.

Of course, there’s no way anyone could build something like this without attracting a certain amount of attention.

Not only was the audio side good enough first time up to give Tammy outright 1^st place in amateur 601+ Watts and 2^nd overall in 601+ Watts Outlaw SPL at the ‘99 Perth Western Salon, but the car is now a big talking point in hometown Kalgoorlie.

The message therefore is clear, ladies - let your men folk loose on your cars.