[462ron]

Oldie, MrFixr,…back in the late 50s early 60s dad had a big car radio with built in speaker on our kitchen counter. Don’t remember the brand or year of the radio or if it was 6V or 12V. I’m assuming it was an older 6V by the size of it. He had a big hulking transformer bolted to the top of it and used the metal window screen in the nearby window for an antenna. It looked like crap but worked well on AC!

Ron

[Oldie Goldie]

463ron, I am embarrassed to say this but the truth is the truth.
I went my entire life up until 38 ( I'm 39 now) without knowing the existence of the boxy car radios Buick used in the 40s and 50s.
Especially the mid 40s to 1952 there was a design they used that was box shaped, with an 8" speaker, and it was as close to a table radio "shape" a car radio ever was.
Id only known the wedge shaped ones and the small box ones like we have today. But the Buick ones, you just plop it down on a table, hook up an antenna, and some beefy source of 6v and start tuning!

I don't remember WHY I looked up the first Buick 980868 radio on eBay, or bought four of them. But I did.
And I'm told they were some of the best sounding most sensitive and selective AM radios ever made.
I also have two 12v 1955 Buicks.
I bought one in crappy condition to steal the 12v vibrator and transformer out of to make a 12v 980868 but when I got it, it was in great shape, the gore I saw on the eBay pics was nothing. Than I got another. Same problem. I don't have the heart to eff them up for some parts.
Solid heavy welding made suckers.
I paid $100 to my door each coming from across the US to me.

I think I found this habit when I was making a collection of vibrator electronics.
I have a vibrator florescent tube, a vibrator 150w inverter, and I had to have a vibrator radio.

[Oldie Goldie]

462ron, what a nice story, thank you for sharing it!

I was only about to find two articles from old magazines talking about using car radios as table radios.

One was from 1945 and it used I suppose a Buick "all in one style" radio but it had a field coil speaker.
They said to build a separate box with a PM speaker in it, remove the vibrator, feed it 6v AC from a beefy filament transformer, mount the radio in the drawer of a desk and drive the new speaker with an umbilical.

The other article is "Junk the car save the radio" from 1964 and goes into merits on how a trip to a junk yard and $10 ($100 in 2024 cash)
you can get a well built steel cased push-pull long distance radio with a nice speaker that would be wayyy better than an AA5 plastic PoS.

Homemade stuff made by 50s or 60s dad or uncle is the best of the best!

[462ron]

I’m wondering now if that radio dad put on the counter might have been from a Buick. It was a big all in one radio with a nice size speaker but ugly as all get out. I know mom wasn’t thrilled with it but she would never complain, dad was the boss. I was only around 10 at the time so I don’t remember too many details other than I can still see the transformer he mounted on top and being impressed by the fact that a window screen worked as an antenna!

Ron

[MrFixr55]

In the early 1930s car where even the steel bodies had a "soft" roof instead of a steel panel, the manufacturer usually had mesh in the roof upholstery for an antenna. For all-steel bodies, an "antenna was hung under the car. I assume that option did not work well.

[MrFixr55]

That Northern Electrc Champ is a handsome looking radio. Oldie, I can't count the times that I have shopped from the famous Italian designer store "Ondastreetini, or the famed German boutique OffendeStrasse. Ron Ramirez, one of the founders of the Phorum (God rest his soul!) was a big fan of the 1950s to early 1960s Fisher vacuum tube HiFi sets. I don't know if I ever posted when Ron was alive that I found an 800B and a 400C on the street. It may have killed him if he knew, as he bought all of his. I also have a lot of HH Scott and Heathkit HiFi stuff that I need to get off my couch, fix and sell some of it.

I don't know if you saw my post about the 2 Philco home models that were built (by Philco!) out of surplus car radios during wartime. Your project is right on the spot! Not only did the 1940s-1960s DIYers do this, even Philco did this to clean house of car radios that became surplus because car production stopped during the war.

I also wonder how many car radios were repurposed as "farm sets", especially in Canada where it took longer for them to electrify rural areas. (In studying the Northern Electric crank phones that I restored and converted for central station use (leaving the original wiring in place), I read that some of these were in use on rural "Party Lines" until the 1970s.

I was a field engineer for a bio-medical firm for many years. The days were long and many a night, I drove home fooling with the car radio picking up stations hundreds of miles away from the New York Metro Area where I was. Earlier, during the CB Craze, I remember working a base station in NC, bragging about his "moonraker" 10M Yagi and 1KW linear. Meanwhile I was working him with a box stock Lafayette CB and a trunk mounted base loaded whip that was less than 36" long. Did that ever burst his bubble, but hey, that's how "skip" works.

Where I live, almost all AM is "talk radio", practically overmodulated with high distortion on music. About 40 years ago, there was an AM station, WNEW (Formally the DuMont network who also owned WNEW TV Channel 5 and the Album Oriented Rock station WNEW FM). WNEW AM 1130 played Big Band and Swing music and had a good signal with good fidelity. Although I am a baby boomer (turning 70 in April) I loved my parents' music more than the Beatles, Roling Stones, etc.