I enjoy old radios. Unlike today’s streamline plastic devices with faux metal details, old radios were center pieces in many homes, the finer models made of hardwood and glass. They carry some weight and a touch of style from a time long since forgotten.

I have a fair amount of old radios in our house in working order. For every working radio, I have also a number of part radios. Then, there’s things like this 1930s Grunow Model No. 564. This wasn’t a purchase, this was an old barn find, a radio in disrepair with no real working parts and on the verge of just crumbling.

This was a table top radio at one point, with a veneered swoop that I thought looked cool. So we dumped out the mice nest that was in it and I put it in my shop, where it has sat on one of my parts shelf for the better part of five years. As you can see in the photographs below, it was in pretty bad shape.

While my wood working skills are not fantastic, I was able to put the hull back into a proper shape slowly.

From there, it was really a matter of putting back in some radio parts to make this thing rock again. Over the years, I’ve rebuilt the inner portion of the “radio” with various test concepts. For a while, I used a hulled Chromecast Audio with a custom amp I built that worked well, but the Google went and discontinued that (which is sad, because I love the Chromecast Audio and it’s easy to wire into preexisting old radios). Then I had a custom audio board I built that may or may not have started a fire (jury still out on that one).

Which leads me to sticking a Google Assistant backed Google Home in it.

Under the hood, this is little more than my test of gutting and re-wiring an older Google Home so that it has a pretty LED light that matches the radio case (which was originally a dial for the power switch of the old radio per the schematic). Google gave me a lot of these Assistant devices over the years at various developer related events and meetings; the least I could do was rip them apart.

The internals of said device are on the ugly side at the moment. I don’t like the temporary mount so I’m going to cut a new internal mount to clean things up. The pure white face also doesn’t quiet ring true, so I’m going to reface that touch interface with something a little more Grunow (the original panel was an off white with black inner dial face).

Regardless, there is something magical about mixing the old with the new. It’s a style all it’s own, an imperfect case that shows it’s weathering with a nice little piece of modern hardware pumping out the latest tunes.

That I can get on board with.