StarGazer
New Member
Over the past 2 years I have restored a 1970 Challenger R/T for a close friend who cannot do it himself. It was more than a ton of work....... and this car had been the victim of a rooftop flood. One thing I took on over the past winter was to clean and repair the 2 watt AM radio. Success. But it was pretty wimpy and you could barely tell it was on over the exhaust note. So I upgraded it. I have all of the documentation for this radio if others need to repair or get theirs repaired.
But here we go..... I bought a mono modern 12 volt 100 watt amplifier. Cheap at under 5 bucks where I found it. I mounted it on the outside bottom of the radio and used the speaker output of the radio for the input to the amplifier. Granted it isn't stereo, but it was a monster improvement. I had to turn the volume control on the amplifier to eliminate distortion and have the radio's volume control respond nicely.
I also installed an MP3 port to add music stored on an SD card. The one I bought also has an FM tuner built in and so far that little feature works very well.using one of the two
The first picture shows the installed amplifier. Note the switched jack for an MP3 player. It is mounted using one of the two under dash radio mounting screws.
The second picture shows where I wired in the jack. The white wire coming to the shielded cable pair carried the radio audio to its "power" amp stage. It returns on the second shielded cable to the board to be amplified as normal. Relatively easy.
Now if you are really crafty you could mount the amplifier inside the radio and amp need to cool.wire it all internally. I show the area inside the radio in the third picture where you can wire it to the radio. Right now I am not going to describe how to do that. I chose not to so I did not disturb the inside in a way I could not put it back to original and besides, that 100 watt amp needs to cool.
I have eight pages of schematics, layout, component list and test poiints if someone needs it.
Later.
But here we go..... I bought a mono modern 12 volt 100 watt amplifier. Cheap at under 5 bucks where I found it. I mounted it on the outside bottom of the radio and used the speaker output of the radio for the input to the amplifier. Granted it isn't stereo, but it was a monster improvement. I had to turn the volume control on the amplifier to eliminate distortion and have the radio's volume control respond nicely.
I also installed an MP3 port to add music stored on an SD card. The one I bought also has an FM tuner built in and so far that little feature works very well.using one of the two
The first picture shows the installed amplifier. Note the switched jack for an MP3 player. It is mounted using one of the two under dash radio mounting screws.
The second picture shows where I wired in the jack. The white wire coming to the shielded cable pair carried the radio audio to its "power" amp stage. It returns on the second shielded cable to the board to be amplified as normal. Relatively easy.
Now if you are really crafty you could mount the amplifier inside the radio and amp need to cool.wire it all internally. I show the area inside the radio in the third picture where you can wire it to the radio. Right now I am not going to describe how to do that. I chose not to so I did not disturb the inside in a way I could not put it back to original and besides, that 100 watt amp needs to cool.
I have eight pages of schematics, layout, component list and test poiints if someone needs it.
Later.
