Tag: Motorola

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“Repurposing” Car Parts

I started this post a couple of days ago and was going to begin by saying that, if your experience is anything like mine, you hear one question over and over when out buying car parts: “What are you going to make with that?” Well, it happened again this past weekend.

We attended the 42nd Annual Old Trusty Antique & Collectors Show in Clay Center, Nebraska, which includes a flea market. We were happy to find many desirable hubcaps that required multiple trips to the truck with arms full:

Starting at the top left and moving clockwise: Three Oldsmobile Fiesta-style tri-bar checkerboard aftermarket caps; a 73-87 Chevy 3/4-ton 12-inch dog dish; 1930 Buick wire wheel hubcap; 30-32 Chevy wire wheel hubcap set of four plus one aftermarket version with the dash in place of the bowtie; and three 64-66 Chevy truck hubcaps (one clip and two nub-style.

At one point a woman approached me to ask what I was doing with all those hubcaps. She said she was worried that she was missing out on some great new craft idea and seemed more than a little disappointed when I answered that I was going to sell them to people who needed them. . . for hubcaps. We never want to see car parts sent to the crusher but also aren’t crazy about perfectly good parts being used to make another clock or yard-art gizmo. Vintage and antique car parts have historical value, and we vastly prefer to get them into the hands of the restorers that need them to maintain the authenticity of their projects.

That being said, we do understand the love for old cars and their various sculptural parts, as well as the enjoyment that comes with surrounding yourself with them where you live. The internet is brimming with ideas for repurposing vintage car parts, but many of those ideas involve the partial, or total, destruction of the parts being used. If you are a person who likes to immerse yourself in the classic car aesthetic, here are some ideas for adding car parts to your decor while maintaining the integrity of the parts for future use:

These old Motorola radios have vibrant colors and a great vintage look, and here they were just piled up to make a small table or stand:

This vintage headlight bezel with chrome trim has been made into a mirror for a car-themed bathroom by sticking a round piece of glass into place with silicone. This bezel is from a 1956 Ford and has the original “buckskin tan” paint.

You can’t go wrong with a wall of hubcaps. From top to bottom, this one features Pontiac, Hudson Terraplane, Chevy, Nash Lafayette, Oldsmobile, and Ford dog dishes.

Emblem letters that are the stick-on type, or ones that are missing their mounting posts, can be made into magnets like these that spell “RAT ROD.”

Everyone loves a beautiful hood ornament, and a good way to display them is on chunks of wood with holes drilled into them to accommodate any mounting bolts still on the ornaments. They look so much better on a shelf than another made-in-China-by-slave-labor knick-knack.

Clockwise, from the top: a Brockway husky, a George Petty-designed Nash flying lady, and a Chevrolet golden gazelle accessory hood ornament.

This photo features a small cloche made with a sediment bowl. The glass bowl has only been modified with a wood craft piece stuck to the closed end with silicone. It sits on a base which is also made of wood.

Finally, if you embraced the galvanized metal trend and used it as wall covering or to encase a bar, it makes a great place to display old license plates with magnets. No nail holes required!

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Motorola Car Radio

Long before Motorola was known for cell phones, it was manufacturing car radios. I am hanging on to this one as a shelf-sitter because it has such a great vintage look about it:

Motorola began in Illinois as Galvin Manufacturing Corp. in the 1920s. The name “Motorola” was developed for its car radios by combining “motor” with “Victrola” to imply sound in motion. The first radio they installed in an automobile was manufactured in the spring of 1930. At that time they were handmade and only five per day were produced. By the second year of production they were able to make 25 per day. In a 1939 newspaper article, Victor A. Irvine of Galvin Manufacturing said that those first Motorola radios took as long to install as they did to produce as the process was virtually an engineering job:

“The entire top of a car had to be ripped out. The chicken-wire netting which supported the car roof had to be cut out and completely insulated so as to provide an aerial. The leads were hand shielded down to the set and all parts of the car had to be bonded and grounded. Motor noise was a terrific thing and could not be entirely eliminated even with the use of spark plug suppressors.”

According to this ad, the process had improved by 1932:

My Motorola Model 505 dates to the 1940s. It had 6 tubes, a manual control and a separate speaker. A variety of different control heads were made to fit the instrument panel of most cars, and, in fact, another 1939 story stated that Motorola had 300 different control heads available to fit any make. In addition to my 505, there was a cheaper 405 and more expensive models 605 and 705. The 705 featured push buttons, eight tubes and was poetically named the “Golden Voice”.