apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Because I am at heart a tinkerer, I did a little research and a little browsing on eBay, and decided to try to give this vintage family favorite a new life. Since we have no paperwork or service manual for the radio and I have no real experience with radio repair of any kind, I just began by taking out screws and removing piece after piece until I found the interal workings of the 8-track. Opening up the radio revealed a broken and corroded belt; I replaced it with a new one and suddenly found myself with a functioning 8-track player. This rather unexpected sucess emboldened me; I purchased a vintage Kraco adapter and found myself able to play cassettes in the 8-track player, a handy treat for my sister who has a box of mix old tapes but no player.

I then got to thinking about how cool it would be to rig this old radio to work with an iPod. I dug out the cassette adapter that once allowed me to play CDs in my old car stereo, and popped that into the 8-track adapter plugged into the Weltron. I flipped the switches, crossed my fingers, turned on the iPod, and was quite frankly astonished to be greeted with the glorious sounds of my favorite travel playlist!

OK, "glorious sounds" might be a bit of an exaggeration- this hack isn't going to give Bose a run for its money any time soon in terms of sound quality. Regardless, the iPod playing through the two adapters sounds better than the music on our actual 8-tracks, and the gritty sound brings back memories of how music used to sound. I love the thought of using this Weltron/iPod collaboration at our next party, and the satisfaction of being able to extend the life and utility of this classic 1970s radio made the $30 investment in parts well worth it.

My friends are split between the "wow that's cool" and "wow you're weird" camps; I confess I'm hoping that some readers here will share my enthusiasm for this project. Thoughts?