NEW RADIO

I am making the most of the good weather as I can only comfortable work on Stella in the open, my garage being too full of shelves etc. When I removed the passenger door card for spraying the sill, I saw that the door speaker had several perforations, no doubt caused by clumsy screwdriver wielding. This would account for the very poor sound quality so I decided to replace both speakers and the old cassette player radio. The top photo shows one of the new Pioneer co-axial speakers alongside the punctured one, the bottom pic shows the old Clarian radio.

I chose a classic looking, but thoroughly modern radio, a Caliber, it had Bluetooth, auxiliary jack, microphone, and a removable front cover. In fact it had everything except decent fitting and operational instructions, but I was able to find relevant instructions on line.

Getting the old radio out was easy, it was held in place by a black crackle finished fascia plate and a couple of sprung plates The hole it came from was much larger than the radio I removed, it was obviously cut for the factory fitted radio.  I had to modify the plate to fit the new unit and in doing so ruined the crackle finish, so I sanded it right back and gave it a couple of coats of satin black, there was going to be so little of it exposed, it looked fine.

Connecting up the new radio was simple, I replaced the punctured speaker with one of the two new ones and switched on to try it out. Great, even connected automatically to my phone through Bluetooth and started to play my music, sounded great even with one of the original speakers still fitted. I went for a drive to check it out on the road and all was good at first, but gradually an interference kicked in, a bit like the comedian, Norman Collier's faulty microphone sketch. Unfortunately it got to the point it was impossible to listen to the radio, even when using the Bluetooth connection to my phone it was just as bad.

As soon as I turned off the engine all was fine. I checked all of the connections to no avail and then posed the problem to the Stag Forum. I immediately got two suggestions, the first was to by-pass the old bi-metal voltage regulator that supplies 10 volts to the instruments and fit a solid state one. It only cost £11 and I bolted it up under the dash and connected up the wires, sadly the problem persisted.

The other solution was too simple to be true, maybe, it was suggested, my choke cable was rubbing up against a spark plug lead and sure enough the choke and throttle cable were coming up through the tangle of HT leads. I re-routed them over the top of the servo vacuum pipe and immediately the interference stopped, Result! just got to fit the remaining speaker and another job ticked off. Changing the timing chains is the next job on the list, that should take up most of the winter months.