Cars

When I bought the Infamous Craigslist 1976 Ferrari Dino 308 GT4 last year I noticed its stereo didn’t work. Now that it’s back on the road and I’ve been driving it a bit, I decided to do a little digging into what might be the source of the issue.

Before you make some knee-jerk comment like “the Ferrari’s V8 should be enough music”, when you’re stuck in traffic or on a long trip even a supercar’s engine doesn’t cut it.

Diagnosing classic radio issues is so easy that an ADD-riddled journalist can do it. If you can hook-up a home stereo, you can generally get a car stereo working, because the same issues apply: one power wire (which usually goes to the fuse box) and one ground wire, plus a positive and ground running to each speaker. There’s also a big cable that goes to the antenna (and sometimes a wire to connect if the antenna goes up when the stereo is turned on). That’s it! Basically, the only catch is to make sure you unhook the battery cable so a live circuit doesn’t give you Don King hair.

Ferraris through the 1980s didn’t come from the factory with radios, instead the cars were pre-wired to make installation easy for dealerships. In the case of my 308 GT4, Ferrari of Los Gatos put in a Blaupunkt AM/FM/cassette deck (a pretty popular choice), which still resides in the center console. Unfortunately, up until yesterday it wasn’t even powering up.

All the fuses in the box were as right as Rush Limbaugh. Thumbing quickly through the car’s user manual showed that specifications for installing the stereo meant there was an inline fuse near the stereo itself. With no access available to the wires, it meant removing the floor-mounted center console and pulling the stereo wires from the back.

As I thought, the five-amp fuse was blown. With a new fuse the unit powered up. Still no sound, though, which made sense since a quick check of remaining wires from the unit revealed the speaker wires weren’t connected. A few minutes with some connectors and a crimper had the positive and negative speaker wires connected, which caused Led Zeppelin to start screaming through the garage with all the quality that 1970’s speaker technology could muster.

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