Thursday, January 28, 2010

Can The Sound Proofing in the Toyota Alphard Be Improved?

It has been a while I met with a fellow Toyota Alphard owner in person. I seen a lot of giants on the road around my area but it is just like another car on the road that you gave a glance but never come into contact.

The last time I met with a reader in person is to help him to look for his giant.

Last weekend I met up with anohter of my reader of this blog in a secluded place.



The place is just nice to have a private chat on our giant without anyone bothering us. The shade is just right to protect us from the hot sun.

The meeting was arrange impromptu as this reader was asking me through email what can he do to improve the sound proofing of his gaint. He recently acquired a '06 AS and he found that he can hear quite clearly a lot of noise from passing vehicle or motorbike either in low speed or high speed.

Since I don't faced such a problem I thought it would be better to meet up and then check out his AS. At least we can compare note as both of us are driving the NFL model.

Well we had a very pleasant chat on everything Alphard. Being new to his car he has a lot of questions and I tried my best to answered them. Both of us drove each other giant and we concluded that his giant sound proofing is not as good as mine.

I did check the rubbers on al the doors and they look ok to me.Other than the noisy tires that he had I couldn't find out why his giant is slightly less sound proofed than mine. After a long discussion, we concluded that one possibility if that the source of the intruding noise could be coming from the privacy glass.

His privacy glass was taken out to do the Puspakom inspection and then later was sent for tinting before refitted back to the giant. There might be some gaps that are not properly sealed that cause the external noise intruding into the interior. Still this is only our speculation and we can only ascertain if he goes back to ask his dealer to look into the fitting of the privacy glasses.

Another annoying thing he pointed out to me is that whenever the giant is going over rough patches of road, the rear seats will be making a lot of rattling noise. He think that his previous Toyota Vios has less rattling noise than his giant.

Well this is expected since the rear seats are sitting on the rail track so there is always some free movement hence the rattling noise. There is a common problem where the clips holding the base of the third row seats can come loose hence causing consistent rattling noise when the car is on the move. I sat at the back row and didn't find anything unusual. The seats on a sedan is permanently fixed to the floor so the chance of it moving and making rattling noise is very rare.

There are some shops that does special rubber lining for the doors and boot to reduce the intrusion of external noise coming into the car. However I feel that unless it is absolutely necessary no point spending the extra money just to get a little improvement.
We spent quite a bit of time checking out the features in each other giant. I let him audition my ICE setup and planted a bit of "poison" to him on ICEing his giant!

One interesting note is that this reader is really following my blog to the dots. He even show me his printout of all my blog posts that is relevant to him and binded them into a (so-called) maintenance manual. I really appreciate his patient and passion in doing that.

5 comments:

  1. Hi, I'm new here and new with the giant... and would like to share some experience that i thought might be useful in order to reduce or eliminate the rattling sound from the 2nd and 3rd row seats. The rattling sound mainly came from the railing track due to free play gap between the hook hole. Mine is PFL AS (quite old though..) the rattling sound was so annoying. ihave tighten all the bolts and nuts but the sound was still there. when i checked the track, i found that the greasy parts were out of grease, some areas were full with sticky dust. then i applied the odorless heavy duty grease (red color) to the railing track and pull the seats back and forth until the grease evenly spread. The result... the annoying sounds reduced a lot. The other areas to look after are the joints, sliding door rollers and hinges, for that area i used the white lithium grease (spray type) - DO NOT USE WD40 for that area because WD40 is not meant for long term lubrication.

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  2. Hi Rizal,

    Thanks for sharing the tips on how to reduce the rattling sound of the 2nd and 3rd row seats. It is probably the most annoying things that affect many giant owners. I was told that to permanently fix it, you'll need to change the clip that hold the leg of the seat to the rail. You'll have to order those clips tough as they are normally not in stock.

    It seems those heavy duty grease does help in many situations. Last week I did the same to the calipers of my small car and those knocking sounds that irritate me when I drive over uneven road is all gone now.

    Cheers

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  3. Hi Nighto Chan,

    I have found another rattler in the giant and came out with a solution. How can I post pictures of the solution here?

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  4. Hi Rizal,

    Why not you do a guest post.

    You can send me the write up and the photos, and I will post it up on my blog.

    Cheers

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  5. hi.. I jz owned alphard AS '06 recently.. Bt thers noise fm both side sliding wic is realy irritating.. I sen dem bek 2d seller bt it stil hv d prob.. Can any1 help..? And d brakes r realy bad too..

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