Custom Shop Radio

[Zasher303]

Stating a few weeks ago i got to thinking about how bad my shop radio is for receiving stations, only getting 3 or 4 stations on a good day. so i started looking into using an old pc power supply and a car radio deck. my first try went bad. i never checked the power supply to see if it worked until i got 2 hrs into the rewiring process. 2 weeks later i found my father was throwing out his old computer with a dead mother board. so i started thinking again and as last weekend approached I had a plan as to how i would build it. 

 

Computer was 10 to 15 years old running a socket 478 with a Pentium 4 supporting dual dvds drives and dual floppy disk drives, 300 watt power supply

older Kenwood head unit

2 cheap speakers from an old home stereo

Various other electronic parts.

Here you can see just about how old this is and what i have to work with.

Here you can see I successfully got my radio to power this time. and here are pictures of all the more wiring you need to do to get the radio working. the red and yellow wires get twisted together and and connected to a yellow wire from the power supply, and the black from radio to black on power supply. but for the power supply to power on you need to jump the green wire on the 24 pin connector to any black wire.

 

 

 

 

About 3 hrs into the build i ran into a snag, i did not realize that the cd player in my radio quit working. luckily one of the pc dvd drives had headphones out, and play/skip buttons. 

 

After some modding, lots of headaches, about 7 hrs, and like 3 trips the the local hardware store i finally got the speakers, antenna, and radio working

 

[Zasher303]

This radio also supports blutooth, usb and aux. i am working on incorporating powered USB 2.0 for charging phones while using the radio. and i am going to put a toggle switch for the switched power to the radio so i can turn the radio off without loosing all me presets and having to clear the demo screen

[Andrew Storlie]

build a wood box for your speakers, a big empty thin metal leaking tower is proabably the worst condition for a speaker. 

 

depending on shop size and psu power you can add a standard 200-400w amp to push speakers harder to get more volume and clarity. when it comes to 12v shit and audio... so much can be done

[Zasher303]

 

1 minute ago, Andrew Storlie said:

build a wood box for your speakers, a big empty thin metal leaking tower is proabably the worst condition for a speaker. 

 

depending on shop size and psu power you can add a standard 200-400w amp to push speakers harder to get more volume and clarity. when it comes to 12v shit and audio... so much can be done

The speakers actually don't sound bad in the case. and i do have a 240 watt anp that I am going to try and figure out how to wire into the system.

[Andrew Storlie]

Just now, Zasher303 said:

 

The speakers actually don't sound bad in the case. and i do have a 240 watt anp that I am going to try and figure out how to wire into the system.

simply take the positive and negative of the psu and wire it into the amp just like the head unit, there should be a small spot labeled remote, or rem, or signal... something, that needs a wire from the 12v side in order for the amp to turn on, i usually put a switch in that wire so you can turn the amp off when your not using it. then your radio speaker out wires or RCA's if it had them, will go to the input of the amp. if the amp doesn't offer high input wires you might have to get an adapter to go from radio speaker wires to rca

[Zasher303]

29 minutes ago, Andrew Storlie said:

simply take the positive and negative of the psu and wire it into the amp just like the head unit, there should be a small spot labeled remote, or rem, or signal... something, that needs a wire from the 12v side in order for the amp to turn on, i usually put a switch in that wire so you can turn the amp off when your not using it. then your radio speaker out wires or RCA's if it had them, will go to the input of the amp. if the amp doesn't offer high input wires you might have to get an adapter to go from radio speaker wires to rca

ill defiantly look into that over the next few days thanks