Looking ahead to the days when Darth is actually on the road, I was eyeballing the empty hole in the dashboard where a radio once lived, especially now that I’ve got a good power source. As mentioned before I think I threw out the old radio that was with the truck, but I’ve still got a period correct radio from the green Travelall. At first, I thought it was a Ford or Chevy unit based on some very quick research but doing deeper digging led me to a very thorough website with actual pictures and I was actually able to identify it as a Motorola 7SMI, which was standard for Internationals of that year.
This particular unit only had three wires coming out of the back: a black wire ending at one side of a fusible link and two green wires that ended in a terminal connector labeled 22. It stands to reason the black wire was power and I guessed the green wires were for speakers. Much like everything else in the truck, I assumed the whole thing was grounded by the chassis, but none of the service manual diagrams I have for any year showed wiring for a radio at all.
These units were developed at a turning point for car electronics, when things were moving from tubes to transistors and circuit boards, so they are a mixture of the old and the new. This one is filled with old capacitors and sported a phenolic-based circuit board, which was the industry’s first material of choice before they realized it wasn’t resistant to wild swings in temperature and switched to silicon. The 60-year-old capacitors were almost surely fried at this point. On top of all that, it’s only an AM radio.
So the question was: what do I do with this thing? Should I spend hours poring over electrical diagrams, a hundred dollars for fiddly electronic parts, and even more time attempting to desolder and resolder scores of capacitors just to succeed and have a scratchy AM radio that only pulled in rambling religious sermons from Alabama? I think you might know the answer already.
I stumbled upon a YouTube video where a guy gutted an old AM radio and installed a $15 Bluetooth amplifier board on one side, using the knob to act as a stealth controller. This meant disassembling the unit, of course, which bothered the traditionalist in me, but I decided I had nothing to lose.
The electronics on the left side came out relatively easily once I’d cut a bunch of the wires, and I kept all of the stuff I pulled out. Assembling the bluetooth receiver, I bench-tested it and found it paired with my phone almost immediately. So I used some of the leftover metal bracing to bend a new cage for the receiver, widened a hole for the stalk, and mounted it back on the chassis in the empty spot, lined up with the stalk hole. Then I pulled the old stalk pot apart to get the brass rod itself, and machined one side down with a Dremel to fit into the slot on the receiver stalk. With that extra length, the knobs mounted on the front as they did from the factory. Cleaning the whole thing up with some 409 and 0000 steel wool, I made the chrome shine again. Finally, I ganged the power lead to the receiver up with the dial bulb so that the dial will light up when the receiver is turned on.
The only drawback I see is that it’s not very powerful. I’ve spent enough time in 60-year-old trucks to know that you need volume to overcome the road noise, and this unit won’t cut it. So if I want to use it, I’ll have to find an amp of some kind to go between the receiver and the speakers.
The one issue I’ve got is that the faceplate that came on the truck doesn’t fit this radio. The knobs are spaced a little too widely for the existing holes. I could use the faceplate from the green truck but that had a Deluxe dashboard and was covered in black vinyl from the factory. So I could remove that, clean up the faceplate and use it instead. And of course I can find other faceplates at Nationals this year as a longer-term solution.
