Antique Radio Jukebox – Part 2

Today I want to share with you some of the work I have been doing on my antique radio cabinet. When I last told you about this project I was thinking that I would try to restore the cabinet its original condition. I was also planning to use it as a jukebox. Complete with an installed computer and some sort of display that would allow me to browse and select music to play.

Since then, I have made a few changes to my original plans, and I want to share with you what I have done so far. I am very pleased with my progress, and with the direction that I have taken with this project.

Instead of building a jukebox into this cabinet, I have instead opted to refinish the cabinet in a more modern stylish design. I am in the process of installing an amplified speaker system. This involves a little soldering to tap into the existing controls on the sound system so that I can use my own volume, bass, and on/off controls.

I am planning to use this cabinet as an iPod dock. I will sit my existing iPod dock on top of the cabinet and plug in headphone and USB power cords. I had thought for a brief time that I would mount the actual iPod dock into the top of this antique cabinet and figure out a way to still have the remote work. In the end I decided that I might not always have an iPod. Ten or twenty years from now, the iPod dock will probably be useless. The way Apple abandons its products, I better not count on them to still be supporting this product for years to come.

As you can see from the pictures, I have really transformed this cabinet into something that looks good with an iPod connected to it. I can just plug in my iPod and turn on the cabinet and I’m good to go. It sure beats trying to wedge a computer with iTunes into the cabinet and figuring out some kind of GUI that would not look too out of place.

I will say that it was an EXTREMELY difficult decision to paint over the detailed wood on this project. I had not purchased this cabinet with the intent to restore it. My plan was to find something to build a jukebox out of. This particular cabinet really didn’t fit my needs for building a jukebox. For $20, it was too good a deal to not purchase. In the end, I feel good about how things turned out so far. Once I finish the internals, I'll update my blog.

I’ll start my search again for something more “jukebox” friendly for that project.

Click here for video of my dock in action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkeSQiHr3dA