[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 Oops, 11M 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.

[Oldie Goldie]

462ron, I don't know everything about every what I call "boxy style" car radios, the ones with built in speakers and are table top radio shaped.
I personally own four 1949-1950 Buick sonomatics made by Delco and they are the most table radio shaped. I understand in the early 40s they had one but it was sloped on the bottom and if you tried to place it on a table it would topple over. I have two 12v 1955 Buick sonomatics (again Delco made) and it will sit square John proud on a table but it's speaker face is kind of slanted and makes it look a little hideous.

I have a Chevrolet radio from 1947 made by Motorola that is boxy but it has more rounded off corners.
It is single ended 6V6 and should give more pleasing tubey 2nd harmonic distortion, or so I read.

I got all these at the start of last year
and I can see the prices are all jacked up now.

But I imagine you could house break a rough bare metal style Buick Sonomatic by painting the bare metal with a pleasing home worthy color enamel, and replacing the rough zinc plated hex screws with rounded off polished stainless steel Philips ones.

[Oldie Goldie]

MrFixr55, yes I did see the photos of the store bought consoles with the car radios in them.
I think the whole idea is just grand!
It might be possible that such a radio might be cheaper than a "normal" radio on the showroom floor as no r&d went into the radio part and all they did was build a nice cabinet and put a car radio in?
At the same time it would be able to suck in the moon with its tubes rf front end and sound pretty awesome with its push-pull likely 6v6s.

A 1940 Zenith console might be out performed with this "cheaper" radio right?

[Oldie Goldie]

Sorry gents, I have been distracted fixing my rust bucket of a 70s electric heater I keep in my bathroom. Fan gummed up.

This thing was so rusty and crusty probably being given up on and left in some old man's damp garage.

I sponge sanded the worst of the rust, stripped the head of the grub screw on the fan blade trying to back it out, snapping the tip of my Klein tool screw driver off.
It's still not coming out. It's in to stay.
I replaced the rusty spade connecters and gross wiring with modern silicon coated fiberglass wire from discarded toaster ovens
Replaced the mushy power switch with a 70s spring action wall switch, drilled new holes and put it behind the rectangular hole. And finally rewired it in a better way to my liking.

I rebalanced the fan blades.
Oiled the fan bearings with blue label 3in1 oil.

The fan was in series with a portion of the coil element ring using part of it as a voltage dropper to slow it down (that's why it glowed brighter than the rest of it).

And the bimetallic thermostat turned EVERYTHING off.
I hate that.

So I moved the fan wire off that "tap" to full voltage, and wired the thermostat to just turn off the element. The power switch turned everything off now.

It works very sweet, the element doesn't look like it's being COOKED now, sleeping next to a heater modified like this, it wouldn't be so obnoxious because it doesn't turn on and off and on then off during its cycle, it just quietly deenergizes the element.

The 10% increase in fan speed makes it project the heat farther than before, and it's not much louder either.

I noticed some Canadian made stuff had weird construction design choices and ideas as they tried to "flex" and "compete" with America with special features to try to stand out. I think they go off the rails a bit and these ideas are kind of kooky. But mostly fixable/deletable.

New handle from an old 70s Canadian tire battery charger as it was the exact same plastic handle lots of Canadian companies used on stuff in the 70s.

It's still a rusty crusty cheap steel heater from the sleazy 70s but it works better than it did after my QoL mods, and it is just for the bathroom so I don't freeze my potatoes in the morning brushing my teeth.

[Oldie Goldie]

462ron, here are two bad photos of the two models of Buick radios I have.

[Oldie Goldie]

MrFixr55 i know this sounds phycho.
But this condolete...recreation of what somebody in a DIY mood might have built in 1964 from 40s and 50s crap after reading the "Junk tge car save the radio" article.....my thinking is like this:

im trying put my mindset to somebody from that time, and choose materials and construction techniques from that time. Even make mistakes that guys did from that time.

so that looking at it today it gives the same first impression a 2025 person might have to some guys 50s/60s DIY budget masterpiece like:

its cool and old school handmade, but its kind of 60s hideous and out of date, but it sounds good...like "they don't build like they used to"
down to "they did it like that back then, and the styling, what were they thinking!?"

i might put in a volume level multiple light meter that lights up in a line too
its in the same magazine from 1964.

im also trying go make this thing serviceable if it falls into future generations hands.

No Bluetooth, and no LED fans though.

i have drawn in MS paint from XP grafted onto my Windows 10 computer, no less than 40 drawings of what style of grill cutout, and different ways to bolt the radio in, all the while boiling my brains trying go understand what some dude back then would have done it.

i hate myself and my skills so im sweating over little details and each drawing i dislike my newest drawing a little bit less than the last one. Progress!

[Oldie Goldie]

here's is a novel audio watt meter display from the same 1964 Electronics illustrated magazine.
It probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine somebody from that time making a honeycomb cluster shape of those neon lights for cool factor.

It says $6.00, but wasn't that like $50 in todays money?

[Oldie Goldie]

462ron well if your father bolted anything to the top of that radio, than it rules out the newer 1954-
12v Buick Sonomatics because they have a big metal scoop up top for the dial light.

In the boxy 980868 model before, you had to go through hhhhhell just to change a burnt out bulb. Awkwardly get the radio (which weighes almost as much as a small bowling ball) out from behind the dash, and taking the radio apart to get to the bulb!!!
I gues on the "next gen" 12v babies all you need to do is reach behind and yank on the metal fitting, pull out the spring thing and change the bulb. Put it back in.

[462ron]

Oldie, those radios you posted look somewhat familiar but then I was only 10 at the time and didn’t really pay attention to it much. The only car radios I have sitting in my attic are one from a 70s Chevy, all solid state and a unique AM only radio from a 69 Mercury Monterey. That radio is unique because instead of having the on-off/volume on the left and the tuning control on the right, this radio has both controls next to each other to one side of the dial scale. It was from dads car and I replaced it with an AM/FM radio from another Merc. I imagine the aftermarket radio business is all but dead today as most cars have the radio buried in with the back up cameras and touch screens that control air and heat and navigation. Even an older 97 Ford Escort way back then had the radio in an oval shaped pod along with other things. Gone are the 2 knob simple rectangular radios of days gone by!

Ron

[MrFixr55]

Hi Oldie,

Not Psycho at all. One of the "trends" in decoration and architecture is "Mid Century Modern". Replicating a Mid 1960s Mechanix Illustrated or Family Handyman project makes perfect sense. Like I said before, when in 1942, Philco had some Ford and Chrysler car radios with no cars being built to install them in. (Chrysler was building tanks and "Deuce-and-a-Halfs". Ford was building bombers and was a licensed builder of Jeeps.) Boomers like me are retiring and doing projects that replicate their childhood (or the childhood they wished they had).

Now that I have a copy of Alfred Morgan's "Boy's First Book of Radio and Electronics", I may build the Geiger counter or the simple 3 tube amplifier (just like those in an AA5, using a 50L6, 35W4 and 12SQ7, on a wood board with a metal ground plate and everything on standoffs.

I'm a big Ford fan but I have to admit that from the 1950s to even into this century, GM and Chrysler had better sounding radios than Ford. Very few Ford radios had a push-pull amp (and the ones that I worked on as a kid were Ford, made by Motorola or Bendix, not a cheap Automatic or Tenna aftermarket job. I remember that the 57 Chevys had a neat 2 chassis job with 2 12V6s. Ford used 6AQ5s

Does that Buick Sonomatic have a rear speaker jack? Does it use a 0Z4 or a 6AX5 as a rectifier (or heaven forbid a synchronous vibrator)?

In keeping with both what Philco did (Yeah, I know that these are Delcos), I would find a power transformer from a late 1940s radio that did not use an electrodynamic speaker but did use push-pull outputs (may have to be from a Philco, as they used 6AX5 or 84 rectifiers that ran from the same 6V winding as the rest of the tubes. It will likely have to mount externally. The Philco Service notes do not show the power transformer (Item #74) in the radio chassis. However, in the original C1908 from which this radio came from, the invertor transformer is mounted inside. This makes sense, as the transformer needed to merely develop the power for the B+ is much smaller than a transformer that has to develop the filament voltages (and a separate winding for the rectifier filament if a 5Y3 is used.