Custom Autosound - Secretaudio SST-V Radio

Custom Auto Sounds long been known for their, you know those AM radios that actually are full featured. AM, FM, Satellite, Bluetooth radios that looked like a factory radio once in their dash. And, you know, it's a great product, but, you know in cases like our you know, 57 DeSoto we've got a factory seven button radio AM, F.. Are, just AM but it does the sixth scan and that's fine but it also is needed to actually operate the record player in this car. So we don't want to really lose that radio. So, you know, as we thought about it, it was like, you know what we'd really want is another radio that we can hook up to maybe the rear speakers and maybe hide a couple front speakers in there to actually, you know, have, you know an AM, FM, you know, full audio experience. And thankfully the guys at Custom Auto Sound also make this great product called the secret audio system. You know, the great thing about this system is, you know it's a full, you know, audio system with AM, FM, has satellite capabilities. Has Bluetooth capabilities. I can sync my phone to it. I can, you know, play, you know if I have an iPod or something like that I can also play my music to it via Bluetooth. I can also, it also comes with, you know provision so I could even do hands-free answering my phone through my audio system. In addition, it's got the outputs for subwoofers and and a whole litany of other things as well as USB provision. So I, if I want to put all my music on a flash drive I can stick that into there and I can have gigabytes worth of music available as well as I can hook my phone charger cord in there and charge my phone off the system. This makes a great addition to our, our audio system. And it includes, you know, in their kit, they include everything you're going to need to get the job done. You know, you have the audio system itself but they give you ample cables. If you wanted to locate this in your trunk or under the front sheet or uneven under the back seat they give you the cables to actually run the that up to the dash that you have your controls up there. It includes both the remote. So if you want to just have the remote and stick that in your console, or, you know someplace convenient for you to get to, you know you've got the remote or you can even, you know they have a small display that you can mount under the dash or in the glove box or hidden away somewhere. So you can actually just manually operate it like you would a normal radio. And it takes up a fraction of the size of the size of a full radio. Also, if you do want to actually mount it into something a solid surface, they include a bracket. So you can actually, you know either cut a hole into kind of flat spot on your dash or inside your glove box or console. You can actually then mount it direct. And it comes with a good, nice trim ring to really trim it out so it looks nice. It comes with the Bluetooth antenna. So we can, you know be able to access their Bluetooth anywhere in the car. The mic of course, for the hands-free phone. And it's a complete package so. You know, what we thought is, you know there's so plenty of room under the dash of this 57 DeSoto but not a ton of room. You would think there would in a car this big there'd be lots of extra room, but, you know we've kind of been doing some spying under there and took out the glove box and decided, you know we could maybe get that unit squeezed up above the glove box and then drop our leads down in. So with that, let's get started on our install on this 57 DeSoto. We have the glove box door off. We pulled the glove box liner out and, you know we've done some scoping around in there and the, you know while we're looking for a nice big square piece of real estate that we could actually mount the unit to. And you know like any dash there's lots of their space under there but there's not like a big void area to mount something to. So what we're going to do is actually build a bracket and we're gonna, you know there's room above the glove box, you know, plenty of room above the glove box for both the ventilation and the unit itself, but there's no flat area and we're not gonna go screw the unit underneath the dash to the dash, because then we'll have the screws coming out through the top of the dash. So what we're going to do is there's a main structure that goes right underneath the windshield and that's a support for the call. And we're going to use that as a point to actually bolt a, a bracket to to actually hold the, a unit above the glove compartment. And it'll give us a nice flat area, and there's still plenty of room around there for ventilation. So to do that, we've cut a piece of paper the same width as our unit. And we're going to slide that up in there and because the where we're going to mount it there's kind of like a little bit of a a pinch weld there that knew he needed to work around. So we'll kind of bend, make a bend in that a bracket. So we can actually bolt it firmly to that structure piece and have a good place to mount it. So let's, let's take a piece of paper go underneath and then we'll figure out where we're going to actually put those bends to make the bracket. We've got a nice place here. And once we kind of figure out where it's going to go, we're simply going to, you know use our hands to crease the paper where the fold should be. And this will give us a kind of a rough idea of where the bins are going to be in the bracket we're going to make it, and we can certainly adjust it later once we get it out on the table. Okay, with that, you know, we've got, you know, we kind of held that in there and we can see that we have a, you know about how much of a rise we need for this piece to actually reach up in there. And then we're going to actually cut this off. And we're going to make a, you know, maybe drill a couple holes to actually mount this underneath. And that'll give us a nice flat surface to mount our radio to. You know we took our paper bracket and, you know used that as a pattern to make, you know we made this one out of 50, 52 aluminum. Basically, it's very similar to what we made with the paper. We drilled a couple holes in it to actually mount it with and we've drilled a couple holes already in the brace underneath. To actually mount it though, we'll be using a self-tapping screw. Self tapping screw is is a lot like any other bolt except for it has like a little cut a little taper on the end and little cuts in it. So instead of actually going in and tapping the hole, the screw itself taps it makes its own threads in the metal, you know or maybe it's a sandwiched metal in there. So it's maybe about eighth inch thick. So we should have plenty of material there to actually hold it up in place. But you know, we're gonna it's gonna need to form its own threads. Usually what I recommend and do when using these is just, you know rather than try to initially thread it in, you know maybe thread it first, you know, without, you know what we did is we're gonna thread this first and make sure that the threads are formed. Then when we hold that up there, our bracket and our radio will be able to actually screw it in without having to form threads at the same time we're trying to hold all this up. Next what we're going to do before we even get this fully into position, we're going to you know, make any connections that, you know there's a couple of connections here that actually dropped down into the glove box. Those of course we can't do until the glove box is back in the car, gonna connect up any electrical connections. We still got some wire or some soldering to do there as well as, you know, the Bluetooth antenna. We wanted to make sure that was off to one side as well as the, the telephone microphone, get that all set. And then we use zip ties to kinda, you know keep things organized under the dash. So when we do actually drop this in, you know, we're not fighting. Trying to find the wires to connect them up to including like the radio antenna. So with that, I'm going to first go in and I'm going to thread this bolt into our holes that we've drilled in there. So we can actually form those threads. As soon as that's done, we're going to actually make the wire connections bring this into position and bolt into the car. Okay. We got the unit installed up above the dash. Up above the glove box, actually in the dash. And now we're ready to, you know we could operate it just off the remote if we wanted to but there's a little more functionality if we actually mount the control head because then we can see the stations and we can, you know get a lot more feedback from our audio player. So we've decided to mount this in the glove box, you know because we mounted the unit above the glove box only seems natural to keep the connections as short as possible. They do have a tent... They do include a 10 foot long lead for this. So, you know, technically I could have mounted that you know, way back in the trunk and ran the the lead under the carpet up to the dash. But in this case we're gonna just keep all our connections short and actually mount the unit itself in the glove box. Of course the glove box is made out of cardboard. So, you know, you can't really bolt the cardboard very good and expect it to stay so what we did is we took a piece of aluminum 16th inch aluminum, actually first we thought we could just adhese, you know contact cement this to the back of the cardboard. But as we thought about it, it was like, geez you know that that's going to probably break down in time. So what we did is we actually put a couple of screws inside to actually, you know, a self-tapping screws and we just ran them straight through into the aluminum and this will actually fasten the aluminum to the cardboard. And then we ground off the ends of the screws. So we didn't have sharp edges sticking up. Then we took the bracket for this unit, screwed it too through the aluminum, to the actual glove box itself. Now, we have the support of not only the whole glove box but this big aluminum piece that we've put in place. So that'll give us a good firm location to actually mount this unit to. Then we drilled a seven-eighths inch hole behind the unit. So we can feed those wires straight up to the unit that's mounted above the glove box. So that way we'll have keep all of our connections short we'll have a good solid surface for this to reside and we'll still be able to, you know. Because the unit isn't that deep, once it's installed, we'll still have plenty of room to reach in and grab stuff out of the glove box. And as soon as we close the glove box door, it's out of sight. So, and it's the whole idea behind the secret audio system is to, you know have all that functionality, but keep it out of sight. So let's get this control unit mounted in here. And it's a little bit easier to do it out here now. As opposed to once we have the whole glove box liner installed, okay we're ready to lift this into position. Okay. Now that we have the glove box door on, the liner back in. You can see that it's supplied a good solid surface for, you know, to mount this, the head unit too. So we have a good place to put it. You know, the installation was actually it was pretty straightforward. We already had a couple of speakers in the back deck. So, you know, we got the wiring done ahead of time. We also had a, you know a couple of little speakers up under the dash, you know for our original radio or just re... AM. It runs a eight ohm speaker and that will run off the center dash speaker and as long as well as the original factory record player. But now we have our audio system installed. We have our, you know. We can add XM Radio if we want. We can have Bluetooth. We can plug in our flash drives. We have all those modern conveniences and quality of sound. And when we're all done and you know we were at the car show, we could just simply. Close the glove compartment and it's all hidden out of the way.