I wanted to put a nice set of speakers in the rear HD saddlebag lids and chose a set of JL Audio C5-570 component speakers. I looked at several sets and settled on the JLs as the best sounding to my ears. All of the speakers I listened to were component speakers due to the following requirements:
1. Typical (but not all) component speakers have a woofer element with a sealed dustcap (the very center of the woofer)
2. In a typical coax type of speaker, the tweeter is mounted on a stalk (or "post). This stalk is mounted in the center of the speaker frame, and a hole is present in the woofer element to allow for excursion of the woofer (movement up and down) as required to repeoduce lower frequencies. Because the woofer has to move in this manner, the hole cannot be sealed around the tweeter mount and if the woofer cone fills up with water, it will leak into the bag. There are some exceptions (such as the Rockford T1582 and T1682) where coax speakers contain a bridge for the tweeter and a sealed dust cap on the woofer. They are few and far between.
I like things to look as stock as possible. I think it is WAAAY cool to have mods increase functionality and performance without looking like anything has been modded (paint is the exception of course) so I wondered if I could build a set of stock looking speakers using JL Audio drivers. I ordered the HD 2-ohm saddlebag speaker kit as a starting point. I could have used the 1-ohm speakers as well, but liked the looks of the 2-ohm tweeter bridge better.
If you read my lid install Part 1 (
here), you'll see that HD does not use standard hole cuts, diameters, or mount hole spacing for the HD saddlebag lids. This caused the install of the JL Audio components to be a lot more difficult and time consuming that I had planned on, but I proceeded anyway. I am very happy with how they turned out, but man would I be hard pressed to do another set. Certainly would be quicker as most of this I had to figure out on the fly. I dubbed the finished product a "Componiaxial" speaker as it is a component set of speakers built into a single coax speaker.
Let me know what you think of the results, and hopefully this will provide some guideance to anyone thinking about doing the same. It certainly can be done, but if you don't like tedious work, cussing a LOT, drinking more beer than you should, and taking a LONG time to complete it - I would not attempt
Steps are a little combined/jumbled as it was a learning experience. First steps are to pop the stock tweeter bridge off, cut out the stock tweeter, and modify the stock tweeter bridge to accept the JL tweeter. Obviously this needs to be accurate work or the finished install will not look good. A pic of the stock HD speaker assembly and a modified bridge with the JL tweeter soft mounted is attached.