Old Hacks: The Radio

Another old item I discarded when cleaning was my homemade car stereo. My mother got a free/cheap radio/phonograph from work when they bought a new one. It also had a cassette player, but that had already stopped working. After a while, the phonograph didn’t work anymore either, so it just became an absurdly large AM/FM radio.

Since there wasn’t much need for an enormous radio, I took it and went to work. Just as with my old phone, I stripped off everything that wasn’t the radio and used as much hardware as I could from the original. The internals of the stereo ran on 12VDC, which made it easy to run on the accessory power in a car. I was mostly driving an old pickup with an AM radio and a single speaker in the middle of the dash. I put the speakers behind the seat and the receiver underneath. Of course, there were a few more steps before that.

Things were simplified by having nearly all of the internals of the radio attached to the front bezel. Pulling that off brought most of the electronics with it. I kept the connector for the audio from the phonograph as an aux input, which you can see in the photos as the pair of RCA plugs that I never connected to anything.

The speaker and FM antenna connectors were on the back panel, so I had to relocate them. The back was some kind of fiberboard, so I cut off the end that had the connectors on it and attached it in the space where the cassette player used to be, using some of the hardware that had mounted the front panel in the case. To provide some stability when I set it upright, I mounted the rest of the back panel on the bottom at the other end, also with the bracket that had attached the front panel to the case.

The original switch was on the AC side of the power supply, so I had to replace that to do my DC conversion. I grabbed an old house light switch out of the junk box. I cut a space in the top of the plastic bezel above the empty space for the cassette player and mounted the switch. I used some old plastic screws and nuts that were, as I recall, originally from a sponge mop.

I also attached two short leads of solid copper to the power, one of which was folded over double. Those two leads fit the push-on power connectors from the back of the cigarette lighter in the truck.

Of course, I haven’t had any use for that in many years, because I went from not driving at all to driving things that had nicer stereos from the factory. Sometimes you need to let the past go, so this piece of the past went to electronics recycling. Before it went, I took a few photos (click to embiggen).