Hello gents! I finally made a new Cougar video after a while - if you know me then you know my car is “finished” so it doesn’t need much at this stage. But one thing I didn’t have was a way to listen to music. I wanted to keep things looking factory / original, so an aftermarket head unit was out of the question. Ultimately, the best option was to convert an original '68 radio to modern electronic guts.
Not long ago, someone at my local cars & coffee gave me an extra '68 Philco AM radio out of a Mustang they used to own, and I thought this was the perfect chance to use it as a core to send in for conversion. That way I could save my original-to-the-car radio and leave it unmodified.
I sent this core radio to Gary Tayman in FL to be converted with Aurora Design electronics. None of this is sponsored, by the way, I paid full price for everything - maybe I’m dumb that way. Anyway, I went with the FMR-3.0 AM/FM board as well as the BTU-3.1 Bluetooth / USB board. He did a great job on the conversion, the only things I changed were to touch up the needle paint in the correct color (it looked like he painted it pink??) and switch out the incandescent light bulb to the LED bulb that was part of the whole set I had installed in my gauges previously. Long story short, it’s great. It has all the functionality you could want, while retaining the original look and feel.
Meanwhile, I had to figure out something for the front kick panels, wanting to keep the factory speaker perforations. I was worried about trying to recreate those little holes in my aftermarket blank panels. Luckily WCCC came through with some decent used original panels that I was able to fix up and use.
I ran into some disappointments with speakers being blown, but you’ll see that in the video. I’ll shut up now and let you check it out. Feel free to post up any questions on how it works, I glazed over some of the functions because I wanted to keep it somewhat concise and not get too boring. Enjoy!
