[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.