Dear mid-60 Buick fans of
"mods,"As promised, here is the second and probably final installment on modifying a Custom Autosound 630 radio to look more original in a mid-60s Buick.
As before, the disclaimer of the previous posting applies!
This is unlikely to wreck your radio, but if you do wreck it, don't come crying to me.
This episode involves giving your radio those very period looking "BUICK" letters on your station selection buttons. When I first did this, there were a number of reproduction stereos that could accept the letters. However, today only the Custom Autosound 230 and 630 have 5 black buttons that are squared off.
Retrosound has gone with rounded chrome buttons.
Ken Harrison Stereos have only 4 buttons for operation, so that won't work either. Even the
Custom Autosound 740 has reverted to the Retrosound styled curved chrome buttons. However, there is one other device that clearly could use these buttons, original Buick radios from the period. So this technique could be used to repair a OEM radio with damaged buttons. That might be the most popular use for this technique on this forum.
You'll need a file that contains a high resolution version of this image:
If you reasonably comfortable with printing, you can simply download the Acrobat (.PDF) file that I have attached to this posting and print it in various ways. If that is too much of a hassle for you, send me a PM and I can arrange for you to send me a self-addressed and stamped envelope and I'll send you printout with the buick letters.
If you want to print this yourself, you will need to print this image onto a sheet of clear overhead transparency film. You could just buy a pack of the stuff and use your own printer, but it is expensive and a little tricky to use. So unless you have other uses for transparency film, I suggest you put the .PDF file from this posting on a thumbnail (USB) drive and take it a local copy shop like:
FedEx Office
The UPS Store
etc.
If you tell them you want this file printed onto a sheet of overhead transparency film, they should be able to do this for a few bucks. The resolution of the image is limited to 600 dpi (that was the best I could get out of raw data.) That means just about any modern printer will be capable of printing a finer resolution than the image actually has. So don't pay for any fancy printing options - you'll just be wasting money.
Note that the template includes 1" scales that can be used to check that the printer is scaling the image correctly. Before paying for the clear film, ask them to print the file on a piece of paper and confirm that the scaling is correct. If not, you could have them adjust the print scaling until you are getting 1" for 1".
What you should get back will look something like this:
At this point the image may not look that promising. The "black" may appear to be more of a charcoal grey and obviously no white lettering. However, keep
da' faith, this can still turn out beautiful. At this point, apply a few coats of gloss-white paint to the back of the transparency. Here is my example after 4 coats:
This is the paint that will give your Buick letters that nice shiny appearance of a new car. As you can see though, the black doesn't look reasonable yet. Once the white paint is fully cured, take a straightedge and a sharp knife and carefully cut out the letters. Doing this before all the painting is complete may seem counter-intuitive, but some clear coat paints will chip when you try to cut the letters out of the plastic film. I discovered this
da' hard way when I tried to cut out the letters after applying the clear top coat.
Once you have cut the letters, place them on some tape that will be easy to remove like masking tape or transparent tape as I did in the picture below. Now you can apply some clear paint to enhance the appearance of the black and more importantly protect the printed ink. Without this step, the printed ink will be rubbed off in a short period of time. In my first attempt to do this I used a semi-gloss clear covering:
Since then I've run a second test with high-gloss clear coating and I think that is a closer match to the shiny radio-buttons.
All that is left is to glue the letters on to the end of the buttons. I couldn't think of a really good glue for this job. These are dissimilar materials so the choice of glue is tricky. I ran a test using CA (super) glue and it does bond nicely and grabs all the way to the corners so that there is no give-away peeling film. However, it is tricky to use and can discolor the lettering. On my radio there is a light hazing on the letter "C" that I think is caused by the glue.
Here is the completed buttons viewed straight on:
Unfortunately, If you view the buttons from an angle, you can see the edges of the transparency film and that definitely detracts from the appearance.
I got a suggestion from a friend to try using a "Sharpie" permanent marker pen. Here is the same buttons after blacking out the edges with the marker pen:
The permanent marker definitely blacks out that unwanted sheen from the transparency edges.
All told, addling the BUICK letters was the easiest of the modifications I made and it is the one change that really changes the appearance of the radio so it looks from the 1960s. Unfortunately, I can see that this technique has limited applications at the moment, but it certainly should be useful to anyone trying to freshen up an OEM radio.
Cheers, Edouard
P.S. The observant reader will notice that I omitted an important detail. The original Custom Autosound 630 stereo had a panel with the word Buick printed in a 1950s style script. Clearly on my radio this feature was repainted. One can dismantle the radio to repaint this, but the path of least resistance is to ask for a "plain vanilla" part be inserted instead of the Buick one. Since these radios are custom assembled for each other, you can let Custom Autosound solve this problem for you!