I really liked the look of the original radio for the 56, but it was dead and all the vacuum tubes looked smoked; so I didn't want to repair this unit, but I needed the bezel face to match the rest of the trim on the dash (if I could find a blank trim/no radio option peace I would use it). I had recently installed a electric wiper motor (New Port Engineering) so the original size wast not going to work either.
It was time to cut the radio down.
A lot of vacuum tubes. Sorry Long McArther the radio is going by-by.
Notice no bread board for the components, they are all just mounted to metal and soldered together. near the center you will notice a small piece of metal at an odd angle on top of a rectangle with 4 small holes, that is actually the dial indicator, and I'll be saving a piece of that.
One of the buttons was damage in the past, and I reshaped (with JB weld) and extended it to match the rest of the buttons, and then welded them to a c channel I quickly made in the break.
I remounted the dial indicator to the backing of the light fixture (yes I did repair the light). the dial indicator was re-dipped in red paint to show off. You can also see that I sheared the vpot for the volume, as I just needed a stub to hold the bar in.
There it is, real stubby and still looks original, with room under my dash for some future MP3 player system.
So what about the waste? I'm going to re-use some of that, I'll show you in the next blog post.
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