I was looking at your picture album and since you don’t have an original radio in the hole can’t you find one with the same spacing as the original?? I suppose not, seems like all of the new ones that I looked at were narrower.
Anyway, I have the factory tube AM radio in my AD but wanted something other than talk radio. So I opted for a Sony CDX-GT420U Solid State unit that I have mounted under my dash. It only adds a face that’s 3x8 when installed. It ran about $150 plus a couple of speakers. I’m trying to keep my truck as original appearing as possible so I set it up so I could slide the unit out and disconnect the plug and antenna from the back in about 20 or 30 seconds if I ever show it. I tuck the wires up under the dash and you hardly know it was ever in there except for a little strip left by the quick mount. I used existing holes in the bottom of the dash for the quick mount so by removing those two screws it would leave everything absolutely original with no holes that weren’t there from the factory.
http://rides.webshots.com/photo/2829042080098611668CRCqYP The speakers are oval and mounted behind the lower door inspection plates. Of course your ’57 would be somewhat different in the installation but this setup really works out nice and in the end I stuck to my code of “first, do no harm” to the originality of the truck..
Now all of this is wasted wind if your intent was strictly to hide the radio completely by using up the glove box space. And I just went out to the garage and put a spare glove box door in front of the radio. The remote doesn’t work with it there. I would imagine that it is a IR LED sensor and it would have to see the light pulses from the remote.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
