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Recently I have been doing quite a lot of work on Jonathan Roots apple green Goose - 8MA1216.
This car has never had any kind of radio in it from new and came with the lovely Ghia radio blanking plate mounted in the binnacle.

Jonathan found an early 70's (non working) Becker Mexico "cassette" on ebay and asked me to instal it in the binnacle and make it light up with the dash lights. Jon doesn't listen to the radio but does like to be able to play his Ipod.

The brief was simple, "I want to look at the Becker but use the Ipod to play my music and I do not want to have speakers in the doors"

There are a few ways of doing this, the cheapest way is to use an FM Ipod transmitter. This however is not very good sound quality and the Becker is broken anyway. The other way is to buy one of Becker's brand new retro "Mexico" stereos that has Ipod connectivity but looks like the original "Mexico" from the 70's. This we quickly dismissed because I have seen one in a Dino and it did not look old.

Jonathan found a very small Chinese amp on ebay that had Ipod connectivity. He also bought some Alpine speakers with tweeters and an "under the seat" type of Kenwood subwoofer.

I now had to install all of this in the car and make it disappear, or nearly. Here's how I did it.

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I found I was able to fit the Chinese amp inside the case of the Becker. I then found it was possible to use the original knobs on the Becker to control the volume and on/off of the amp. The on/off was easy because the original volume knob has an on/off switch built into it. I wired the amp and lights through this.

I then had to figure out how to connect the other original Becker knob to the volume switch in the amp. I considered miniature universal joints like you see in R/C toys but I did not have any to hand so I used a short piece of Bowden cable instead. This worked very well. I had to solder a piece of brake pipe onto the back of the shaft that attached to the knob and then turn down a brass piece to push over the plastic volume knob on the amp.

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