The volkswagen diesel 1.6L is a very loud engine. I am going to try to quiet the interior of the car so I can listen to music without the diesel sound drowning the music out. To do this, I need to add sound deadening and sound absorbing materials. The deadening stuff reduces vibrations and the absorbing stuff quiets everything down.
First, I needed to remove all the existing sound deadening to make room for the new stuff. The OEM mat consists of a bunch of recycled fibers glued together. It is cheap to produce, but not very effective.
Here is some mass loaded vinyl left over from a home theater installation. It is a very heavy rubber sheeting. When this stuff is glued to the sheet metal, it adds mass which dampens any sounds or vibrations that try to pass through.
I could have used DynaMat or RAAMmat. But this was free.
I used contact adhesive to glue it to the floor pan of the car. Contact adhesive adheres just fine to the newly painted Rust Bullet surface.
Here is some sound absorbing foam that I bought. It is called Volara closed cell foam. It is similar to Ensolite that RAAM audio sells. All it is, is foam that absorbs sound.
To get more performance out of the foam, I glued aluminum foil on the sheet of foam. Then I glued another sheet of foam on top of the foil making a foam-foil sandwich. The theory is, that the aluminum foil will reflect sound back into the foam.
Here is the finished product. You can see the thin aluminum foil layer in between the two sheets of foam. (This picture was taken before I fixed the rust on the floor pan)
I used foil tape and contact adhesive to glue the foam sandwich to the interior of the car:
I did the whole dash like this:
As soon as I get more time, I will finish covering the interior with this foam. Then I will be able to run some speaker wire for the sound system...