"Mitch" - The rescued '85

[ostlar]

January 2020

I quickly discovered the engine had some issues. Whenever I put more then 3/4 of the pedal down, it backfired up through the air intake and I lost power. I started by diagnosing the distributor, and quickly realized the ignition points was adjusted wrong and had burned a hole in it.

Luckily there was one spare in the glove box so I mounted it, adjusted the timing and voilá, the car ran fine again. Ordered all new ignition parts (ignition pins, spark plugs, distributor cap, capacitor etc.) and kept them in the car in case something else went wrong.


First mod

The first modification was one of my favorite ones. I'm a music lover and I was missing something in the car.
I wanted to be able to play music from my phone through Bluetooth, but I didn't want a modern car stereo protruding out of the dashboard.

The solution? Take out the old cassette deck, modify its internals to house a Bluetooth amplifier and power the speakers from that.
I had a thin, small amplifier laying around that fit perfect in the cassette tray. It had 2x8W of power and was more than enough for the small speakers and cabin.


25.01.2020

I wired up the on/off switch of the cassette deck to the amplifier so I could turn it on and off.

Changed out the old 90's Pioneer speakers with JBL STAGE2 two-way speakers, but I kept the old Pioneer grille.
Had to modify them a bit to fit the tweeter, but they looked retro, and sounded amazing.


30.01.20

Pretty happy with the result, as I tried to keep the old, worn retro style, but featuring great sound quality.
The Philips cassette deck and Pioneer speakers weren't original to the car, I believe it originally had just a mono center speaker in the dashboard, and a simple radio with no cassette deck.


Here's what the dashboard looks like:

24.07.20