Tinkering, Part 7

This post actually recounts our adventures of November 16, last Saturday. I know, I'm slipping.

The project for Saturday night was to get the audio system back to a workable point. "Audio system" may be a bit generous. I have the factory AM/FM radio with the rear speaker option. Status of the system prior to Saturday night was that you could turn on the radio, and noise would come out, but it was not pleasant noise. It was the sound of severely thrashed speakers severely thrashing themselves some more. I don't know why a paper cone manufactured 35 years ago should not still be good.

Cheap American junk.

We started by disconnecting the battery, pulling out the ashtray, pulling the defrost "Y" pipe and removing the radio and front speaker. While I was doing that, Jeff was removing the rear speaker.

On the bench, I pulled the top cover off the radio.

As you can see, there was a lot of dust and gunk. Without blasting too hard, I used compressed air to clean the boards and lightly washed them with tuner fluid. I did the same with the fader. Here's how the inside of the radio looked when I was done:

I repeated this process from the bottom and back of the radio.

Next, I took the diecast nose off the radio to clean the lens and repaint the black trim behind it that showed some damage.

Here's the before shot:

And after the cleaning and painting:

I opted to buy a pair of speakers for the car from one of the vendors. These are advertised as fitting the front or rear. The front speaker came with an adapter bracket. After using the bracket the speaker fit after a fashion, but not optimally. The supplied rear speaker could not be used in the factory mount. First of all, it did not come with any hardware to attach it to the frame, which was designed for the same type of speaker that is used in the front, and has holes at the corners of a rectangle. We remedied this by cutting the frame out of the old speaker, leaving an adapter plate with an oval hole:

Then we drilled holes in the adapter plate and screwed the speaker to it:

This is where we ran into our next problem. As you can see in the picture, the speaker has a tweeter that sticks up quite a way from the top of the mounting surface. Our solution was to change the speaker for one we removed from Jeff's Dodge pickup when we put the Infinitys in:

This fit better, although the speaker is still maybe an 1/8th of an inch taller than the original installation. We reinstalled radio and all the parts we removed to get at the front speaker. The moment of truth came: we turned it on.

It's still a crappy sounding radio.

Well, it looks stock, and at least I can listen to FM radio.

We are tentatively calling this the Spring Dust Off. If you live anywhere within range of Lansing and you want to come, come even if you're not a member of either of these chapters. The Michiana chapter doesn't know it yet, but they're participating, too. The format is going to be very low key; cruise to the site, potluck food and hang out for awhile. If you're a member of one of these chapters, you'll get notice in your newsletter. If not, drop me an e-mail and I'll keep you posted.