Success, the Infinity Reference 3022CFX 3.5 inch Coaxial speakers fit perfectly and sound wonderful. In addition I cut some Alien Tape strips
https://www.tryalientape.com/ to seal around the speaker gaps to create a proper seal so that there would be no port noise or rattling from and around the metal speaker basket. Keep in mind that yes, I did not use the old speaker housing cans.
For the drivers side I used the cap of a pen to carefully pop the grill. I must admit that I used this technique from the following video by
Agus Vargas. He uses a pen trick in the following video.
I however did not have the same luck on the passenger side dashboard. For the passenger side, the plastic of the dash was far to inflexible even when I used a heat-gun to gently and carefully warm the plastic. Keep in mind I am in Massachusetts in February so things are more brittle than where
Agus is.
For the passenger side, I figured out that if I removed the glovebox and reached up and thru the dashboard from underneath with a a thick, short stick or
blunt end of a cold-chisel and pressed in a speaker grill tab from below, that the grill should pop out. I was thrilled that this worked since this is
one of the most difficult dashboards I have even dealt with.
I was going to remove the head-unit and install a HD-Radio tuner inline with the antenna but seeing how difficult the dash is to pop out without possibly scratching things and how my Spark EV just hit 100k, I think I will think long and hard about putting in the time for that!
I hope this post helps make one of the most frustrating dashboard speaker installs a little easier for someone else out there.
(Good Luck!)
