[Oldie Goldie]

I'm sure your familiar with the phony Philco flavored fake cathedral radios from China.
They have what amounts to a cheap pocket transistor radio board inside a particle board cathedral style cabinet with some cheap oak veneer. It comes with a horrible generic tape deck that breaks just looking at it and a speaker that would sound kinda ok if it had an amplifier with the power to drive it. Which it doesn't.
I saw it at a thrift store for $10 and wanted to see/hear if it was as bad as they say.
Ehh...it functions as well as a cheap POS transistor radio is expected to.
The big particle wooden cabinet helps it out though.
It has a design flaw that it's other style radios have. The speaker is mounted to a back board with the grill cloth over it behind the decorative cut out on the front. The backboard has a channel of fiberboard down the center of the hole, almost covering the speaker. The opening is like two capital Ds back to back. Cut the center "column" out and it sounds a lot better.
The sensitivity sucks. The sound was mediocre. The knobs were....cheap.
I spent $2.00 and got a commercial grade automotive (bus?) radio at another thrift store.
Spent Saturday gutting it, cutting a rectangular hole in the front, filing the edges, mounting the radio, and testing it. I pulled out the excess globs of hot snot glue. Why I spray bombed the inside battleship grey today I don't know. It did cover up a lot of the super cheap china construction.
It sounds really good, even with that dinky speaker. And its sensitive as a car radio with an rf amp front end should be!
Well I have a big beefy 5ohm speaker I want to put in tomorrow. Have to make a new backboard. Need to figure out an internal power supply.
Going to put a blank panel over the tape deck hole. Maybe put an aux in Jack? The radio has aux in RCA cables.
It was a sweet surprise the display was amber/orange and not nuclear blue or fire red.
I had a lot of fun doing a little woodworking putting this together yesterday. What do you think? It's going to sit up on my fridge for kitchen ambient music and morning news/propaganda report.
Some might think this is an abomination but I was about to dump it in the garbage the way it was. Than got this idea.
I hope you like it.