Will a standard late 70's Delco radio fit the dash of a 72"

[dman535]

I know Corvette had its own special radio size. My wife's truck has a POS Sparkomatic cassette radio and I wanted to transplant a later model Delco am.fm radio. Want to maintain an GM OEM look but want newer radio with FM capability. Will it fit? Anything special I need to know?

I attached a picture of what I am thinking of using.

[ray_mcavoy]

You can probably make it work but it won't be an exact fit.

The stock radio opening in these trucks is designed to accept a radio with the knobs spaced 6-1/4" apart. While many 73+ GM radios (like the one you have pictured) have a narrower 5-3/4" shaft spacing.

Fortunately, the shaft holes in the dash are quite large so the closer spaced shafts should still fit through without any cutting ... they'll be off-center of the holes so you'll probably need to fabricate some sort of home made offset mounting cups to hold the radio in place. And you might also need to make a trim bezel to cover up any gaps.

[davepl]

I have found (and this may not be the case every time, but has for me) that to mount any kind of radio in our dash you need those two little tin cups that go over the shafts.

Even the "Custom Autosound" garbage has the knobs sticking out because of that.

Here's my "looks like a factory FM but isn't" unit. I love it. It was a birthday gift so I don't know the source, but could likely find out (someone else surely knows here).

I highly recommend these units. My only concern is that (a) the backlight is green, and I don't know if that's correct for original, and (b) the black pushbuttons are kind of wobbly and don't like up pretty unless you do so yourself. That might replicate the factory for all I know, but I've never had a factory FM radio from one of these.