A friend was disposing of his collection of old radios and various bits and pieces and "threw" them in my direction. Amongst them was a rather battered old car radio – an Astor AJS.

Unfortunately, its front panel escutcheon was broken and I initially had no idea as to how I might fix it. As a result, the set was put to one side until a friend suggested that a product called "Knead It" from Selleys may be suitable for the repair.

As it turned out, this was just the shot for remaking the missing section of the escutcheon but more on that later. Now I had no excuse for not restoring the old Astor radio.

Universal radio

The AJS is a 6-valve, universal, vibrator-powered car radio that runs off 12V DC. What do I mean by universal? Well, this set is an economy model and was designed to fit any car of the 50s and 60s by being screwed to the underside of the steel dashboard. It has an integral speaker, no RF stage and can be used with both positive and negative earth vehicles (many English vehicles in particular used positive earth at that time).

This top-chassis view emphasises the compact nature of the unit. Note the vibrator supply components at the top of the photo.

Sets of this type were a joy to install, taking under half an hour from the time the vehicle arrived in the workshop until it was driven out. I remember fitting car radios with a firm in Adelaide back in the late 1950s and we could fit and adjust a car radio in a Holden FE, complete with a separate speaker behind the dash, in about 20 minutes. A really switched on installer could probably fit one of these AJS models in under 15 minutes. Try that with the latest vehicles!

Astor made many different car radio models from the 1930s until about 1970, when imported car radios sank that part of the domestic radio manufacturing industry. Along with other Australian manufacturers, they made many high-performance receivers that could pick up stations over long distances. These sets were often limited only by the effectiveness of the ignition interference suppression and the amount of noise generated by the high-voltage power lines that run alongside many of our roads and streets.