Boxster Rear Speakers Rebuild

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Way back in 2004, we found ourselves inspired by Rob Sampson, and so we built ourselves a set of rear speaker enclosures for our 2000 Porsche Boxster using PVC pipe fittings, some cotton batting, and four 3″ drivers.

Why PVC? Because PVC is non-resonant, inexpensive, and cylindrical, it is ideal for creating compact speakers, tubular “boom tubes,” or complex transmission-line enclosures for deep, rich bass.

The enclosure held up extremely well for 22 years (TWENTY-TWO YEARS!), but the foam surrounds on all four of the speakers had completely disintegrated. Of course, that did not mean that they were “dead” 🙂 It just meant that we merely needed to replace them, as we had done for the front speakers.

We won’t bother with repeating the repair process. Those interested should refer to the past DIY posts. Having done it a few times, we were able to complete the repair in about an hour (prepping, cleaning, gluing, waiting, and reassembling).

Simple Speakers didn’t have any 3″ foam surrounds kit available, but we found a source on Amazon that just sold the surrounds. They arrived in a few days and were exactly what we needed. We didn’t have to order any glue as we still had some left over from past speaker DIY repairs. 

We would recommend using glue specifically designed for gluing foam. Water-based PVA (Polyvinyl Acetate) is the industry standard. It is highly flexible, forgiving during application, and won’t melt the foam.

Once the glue had dried, we reassembled everything and confirmed that the speakers were working before reinstalling them in the car. The quick and dirty test was to hook them up to a receiver and play some music, which they did.