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Hello folks,
Have any of you installed a AM/FM stereo with Bluetooth , that you didn’t cut the dash. 12 volt, I’m looking for one that has the Bluetooth built-in . I’m wanting to stream music through the Bluetooth. Please let me know what you have if you don’t where you purchased the unit. A picture would really be nice.

Thank you
Dendo
email dennis1959@bellsouth.net

What year truck?

They make new ones that fit the original opening. Most venders carry them. Look in eBay and fo a search for “1952 Chevy Truck Radio” and substitute your year for 1952.

Read the reviews carefully, I bought a well known brand name radio which was far from inexpensive, but this year (just off warranty) the audio adjustment quit. It's not mechanical either, its a failed capacitor or chip somewhere so basically junk now.

That said, it did fit nicely.

I can't believe I don't have a photograph of it - I'll try and remember to grab one today. Would have it out driving today but it's pouring rain.

I would contact them and maybe it can be fixed, I would hope they would rather have a happy customer than one that would report back to every one that owns a old truck that they don’t last.

As far as location is concerned, I put a modern radio in the glove box. A faceplate with knobs plug up the original holes.

Excellent point, Kevinski. I'll remove the brand name from my post as I don't want it to come off like a criticism. They look good.

The point I intended to make there was simply to check the reviews and make a fully informed decision. The issue I ran into turned out to be commonly reported (but I didn't research it before I bought it).

I have seens this idea mentioned a few times. Do you have to cut out the back of the glove box to make it fit? Or just punch a hole for the wirinf?

The radio fit fine but you might make some measurements. I attached it to a 1x4 using the little screw holes in the bottom of the radio. I then bolted the 1x4 through the bottom of the glove box. You can see the bolt head in the picture.

A cheap $70 Insignia radio didn't last long. My '48 rides like a truck.

My much nicer $70 Sony has lasted for years.

I bought a $30 radio a $10 antenna and a pair of $30 speakers from wally world. My radio has been floating around unmounted in the glove box for three years with out a problem. The antenna is in the glove box as well and comes in fine. I didn't want to bastardize my 6 volt system so I wired the cigar lighter and the radio to a solar panel on my tool box. People have asked if my truck is solar powered.

You can buy a "hidden radio" that you can mount practically anywhere, even under your seat.
You will need to buy a 6 Volt to 12 Volt converter if your truck is 6 volts.
It comes with a battery operated remote control and BT built-in to the unit.
I suppose you could link it to your SMID (social media insanity device) but I wouldn't do it.
These old trucks need both hands on the steering wheel and eyes looking out the windshield.

I got one of these
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087FWD6C4/ref=dp_iou_view_item?ie=UTF8&th=1
I have the three knob version, with power/volume, bass, and treble. It's the size of a pack of playing cards, and I zip-tied it to the bottom of my dash. I have a pair of 4" speakers mounted in a $6 plastic ammo box from Northern Tool that is stuck up in the stock speaker location. It is Bluetooth or aux-in only, so I play it off my phone or iPod. It sounds decent, but I can't hear it well at speed. I intend to redo my exhaust soon and getting the glass pack muffler out from under my feet, and end of the pipe out to the back bumper, I'm hoping some of the noise in the cab will go away. I'm also considering making a wood speaker box since I think it would sound better than the plastic ammo box. If your truck is on the quieter side, this may work for you and not cost too much.

Eric what do you use to power this gizmo do you use the 6 volts from the truck battery ?looks interesting for the price .

Yeah, I like the look of that too. Mount it in the glove box and have it paired to the bluetooth.

12 volts in mine. It uses one of those plugs like in the picture- I don't think it came with the plug- I think I salvaged one off an AC/DC converter for an old portable DVD player or something, or I may have bought a plug and hooked the wires up to it, I can't remember. It's powered off the post on the ammeter and grounded to the dash. I suspect it has a slight draw even when it's off, but that type of plug is easy to pull out and leave hanging for days I'm not driving, and put back in when I take the truck out. I guess I could wire it off the ignition switch to take care of the draw issue, but then I couldn't turn the radio on with the key off.

Line the inside of the plastic box with carpet foam and it will improve the sound!

I may give this a try ,I think it would work on the 6 volt system .

Near the power input on the case of the unit and in a couple of other images/diagrams and spec lists on the page it says DC 9-24 V, but I also see one part of the page that says 5-24 V so I guess it's worth a shot and you can buy a voltage converter of some type later if it won't work on 6.

Also, adding poly-fil (super cheap stuff used for stuffing pillows) is a GREAT way to improve the sound of any sealed or ported speaker enclosure. It also fools the speaker into thinking the enclosure is larger than it is. Improves frequency response and deadens the resonance of the enclosure, "tightening" up the entire frequency range. Fill the enclosure with poly-fil very loosely, you don't want it packed in there tight!

NorthCoast3800, if you get no joy with the maker of your radio, please don't junk it. Instead, please me know what happens (PM me or send email to jon_goodman@yahoo.com). I can't promise anything, but we may be able to consider some alternatives. Way too many capacitors and IC chips are coming from China during the global electronic component shortage. Some are not too bad and some are downright dangerous. And as you would expect, the least expensive ones are the worst by far. I've seen some that failed in less than 1 year and I just had to replace 2 capacitors in a computer power supply. One of them literally exploded. Not something you want happening in a metal box which converts 110 AC to 3.3v, 5 v and 12 v DC.

Thanks Jon G; if it's not an obvious fix then I'll be donating it to a fellow 'Bolter who reached out about doing the same thing. So it won't go to waste. I simply don't have time to spend on trying to work it out, I get the basics (and I've changed capacitors in the speedometer and such in my daily driver '94 F150 and some other electronics over the years) but the real troubleshooting of that sort of thing is a little over my head. Every year I seem to be able to fill the brain a little more beyond capacity

I'll be trying out another brand although they all look the same and I fully expect everything comes out of the same factory. Roll the dice one more time I guess, I do enjoy how they look. I do not enjoy spending the money, but... take the good with the bad right?

The other day I had it out for the last drive of the season (nice sunny day and before they started salting the roads) and it was around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, everything worked as normal for the first five minutes lol. But the control quit pretty fast after warming up. Ah well.

If the problem is temperature sensitive, that tells me almost certainly we're looking at a failed/failing capacitor. Where that capacitor is located could be the mystery.

If the other member changes his mind, please let me know.

I'm certain you know this already, but if you remove enough sheet metal to allow you to see the component parts, please look for capacitors which are swelled, bowed at the top and/or bottom, leaking anywhere (you will usually see a whitish stain on the phenolic board) but most commonly at the bottom...anything like that. And these will nearly always be electrolytic capacitors (look like a tiny beer can in ways)...although today some of the newer variety of capacitors (non polarized) will be made to mimic this same look. The trick comes in the integrated circuit chips. Those will contain transistors, diodes, resistors...and capacitors. When the capacitor part of those fail, the chip is toast and those can be devilish difficult to diagnose and replace. Often you simply can't find the right IC. Electronic supply houses sell chiller spray. You can use that while the radio is powered up to test capacitors. Spray each one a bit and if the radio starts working correctly, you have found the culprit. Recently I purchased some pre-made circuit boards from a Chinese company for a test project with which I'm involved. What I learned was surprising...one board had a defective variable resistor but the rest of the circuit was ok. I figured I could just replace it and move forward, but the Chinese had built it on one thin and flimsy printed circuit board and then had laminated a thicker and more durable board to the bottom of it, making a phenolic sandwich. So, you could not un-solder and change any of the pass-through mounted parts. For what it is worth my uncle made capacitors for use in radios during the 1940s. A lot of people did that as a cottage industry (lunch money, basically). The war effort had depleted the supply and makers of radios were contracting with people to make them at home for pennies each.

Jon G, thanks for the response (and sorry for my delay here it's always hectic, especially so this time of year).

Good reminders and advice above, I'll take a look - I do actually have a supply of capacitors on hand. If the solution is obvious, I may take a shot; if not then I'll pass it along. Not sure when but in theory, I have my Christmas vacation coming up.

NC3800

Better late than never, right?

NorthCoast3800 graciously sent me this radio last year to try and do a failure analysis. Life happened and I didn't get to it until now.

I hooked it up to a couple speakers and my bench supply and fired it up to see if I could replicate the issue. After about 10 minutes, the volume knob started getting intermittent, so I pulled the top cover off and took a look at it.

The caps appeared to be in pretty good shape, but the solder on the ground side of the volume knob pot looked sketch. I used my heat gun and my air compressor to alternately heat and cool the pcb on the volume knob and I was able to cause/fix the issues.

Upon removal and inspection, you can see that there was a cold solder joint on that pin that had started to crack. I reflowed it, reassembled the radio, and I am not able to cause that failure anymore. I listened to it for about an hour while I cleaned the shop.

Looking online, this appears to be a pretty common problem. I suspect that is because the pin in question is going directly into the ground plane so it takes a *lot* more heat (compared to the other pins) to warm up the ground plane to get a good connection.

If anyone else has this issue with the Retrosound radios, all you need is a #2 phillips, a reasonably high power soldering iron, and 5 minutes.

I have always thought that cold solder joint problems date back to the original assembly. So its good that you found it. On a different note I am not impressed these days when I hear about expensive sewing machines and home furnaces failing because of the "computer board". These failures shouldn't be happening. If our modern cars start failing like this, it could be a dangerous development.

A cold solder joint is a defect from when it was new, but the failure will not always manifest immediately. A cold solder joint is much weaker and more brittle than a proper one one it has a tendancy to crack when exposed to vibration.

Glad to see you figured that out Fibonachu and thanks for sharing that information.

If this happens with my replacement, I'll have a better idea where to look. So far, so good on this one. Happy to know that radio will live on as well - otherwise, it was going to sit around in my shop for a decade collecting dust.

Truckernix ... you raise a relatively unknown spectre that will get us all soon enough. While not an electrical engineer by any stretch, I did spend a few years on the Navy "Aging Aircraft" team and one of the issues we were wrestling with was that of Counterfeit Parts -- especially with microprocessors and circuit boards being made of sub components from non-qualified vendors. A vendor might qualify a part (circuit board for a piece of avionic equipment, for example) and get a few through the qualification and testing phase. But then the production run might be made with subcomponents the were knowingly or unknowingly bought from "offshore" sources that were cheaper and of poor quality. One particular issue seen in these parts was the use of solder with impurities or just poorly made.

Counterfeit parts became a real issue (and will come back again in a few years) when we had a very old fleet of aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps -- 50-year old P-3's, 30-year old F-18's, 25-year old H-60's, etc. Even the "new" MV-22B had issues as some of the parts inventories for that aircraft were ordered, bought and delivered in the late '80's and into the '90's (yes, it had a lengthy gestation ... ) And when I say parts, I'm mainly referencing electronic parts and components, but the hardware (landing gear struts, wing spars, rivets, bearings, etc) have similar issues.

And like our old trucks, a lot of these platforms have parts that aren't made anymore. Not only that, but the manufacturer of the part isn't around anymore, either. And in a lot of cases, took their drawings, schematics and specs with them into nevernever land. Reverse engineering aging electronic components was one of our core capabilities -- especially with the F-14 program . So we'd reverse engineer a component and then we'd have to go to the electronics manufacturers to see if we could coax any of them into making them for us. Remembering that these were companies who make stuff by the millions. They'd ask "how many?" and we'd say "Oh ... 150." and they'd politely have us escorted back to the front desk.

Or they'd just try to sell us a new design replacement part that was made out of pure Gold (by the price).

So by the time we found a specialty manufacturer to actually produce it, we'd have to check their supply chain, too. And talk about a tangled mess of interconnected ratholes, some even going to the slums on the outskirsts of LaHore, India or Bangkok, or (more usually) the previously mentioned "offshore" source.

So you take what you can get. Do you think some kids in a sweat shop cranking out microprocessors (or any of his/her bosses) are very concerned about, or even conscious of, impurities in their solder?

In our experience, the bad solder (and I forget the elements here) would degrade and cause "tin whiskers" to grow on the soldered pieces -- you may be familiar with that. Even a microscopic tin whisker could cause a component to fail if it grew enough to make contact with an adjacent circuit.

With most home appliances and electronics coming from that same "off-shore" source ... And we tried very hard to find North American manufacturing sources but they have all but vanished -- leading to another important working group that gets little attention -- Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS Working Group)

Anyway, our inside joke (that wasn't funny) about a sister agency with similar problems was that we were glad we weren't astronauts ... Tin whiskers grow faster in microgravity ... We can send people to Mars... but they may not be alive when they get there.

Think Swiss Air 111 .... (but that was a Kapton fire .... related issue, though)

Oh wow that is scary stuff. In the electric utility where I spent my career, we had some problems with what was called silver migration, very similar to what you described. They could cause false or unwanted trips of major transmission lines. The same thing happens in old radios with some of the trimmer capacitors. It has always amazed me that we could send people to the moon and back without catastrophic failures, Apollow 13 being an exception.

A lot of the electronics problems in the late 90s/early 2000s (and continuing somewhat today) were because of the change to lead free solder. Lead is a fantastic material for solder because of the low melting point and high fatigue resistance. When they went away from it, they started using silver and alloying it with tin to lower the melting point and cost. The problem is that tin has extremely poor fatigue properties so it tends to crack when placed in a vibration environment, especially when under load (such as through-hole components). The move to surface mount components and potting electronics has helped, but it is still an issue.

In the case of this radio, contamination was not the problem. The problem was a combination of the vibration environment and the solder joint was not properly heated when it was assembled. That pin goes into the ground plane for the board, so it needed 10x the heat to get the pad hot enough for the solder to flow out and adhere properly. Whoever initially built it did not get it hot enough, so the bond was poor and it cracked.

On the subject of counterfeit parts, there was a big snafu in the hobby electronics world where a couple suppliers were selling fake Atmel processors. Sparkfun did a deep dive investigation into a couple of them that is an interesting rabbit hole to go down if you get bored:
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/350

Truckernix A question on 51 radio,I have a hummer that even has a dial light when I put it on my 6 volt charger. Is the charger likely to damage it ?? Next what to use for an antenna to see if it may work. Would appreciate your advice.

Sorry my notification ended up in the wrong place on my computer. Your 6 volt charger will not harm your radio. For an antenna, you can use a piece of hookup wire say at least four feet long. Just bare a 1/4" or so on the end and poke it into the middle hole in the antenna receptacle. I would be interested to know how you make out.