I acquired an original 72 am radio for my 72 at homecoming - I have the lower bracket shown above - but am missing the longer arm circled in photo - can someone enlighten me to it’s purpose and if I need that to install it? (The radio is for looks only - running a blue tooth set up separate from radio - but plan to get old radios lights working)

 

You can probably get away without it if you have the other support/ground strap.

 

Those brackets are to increase the stiffness of the radio mounting so that vibrations from driving don't cause that insanely heavy radio to break the plastic dash.

 

If that plastic strap isn’t there, it will be a big PIA attaching the one end to the center dash vent up top.

 

so that long skinny one is plastic? Is it reproduced?

 

is this the strap?

 

I have this

Is this the long skinny thing I circled in my original pic?

And do I need this to make the light work (radio won’t be used) and does this add any support to the radio?

 

There you go

 

ok - ordering the plastic strap and the ground strap then - thanks

 

Where do you attach the radio ground strap? Csm doesn’t show it best I can tell?

 

If the radio section won't be used you can possibly gut some of its audio-related circuitry to shave off some chassis weight.

Of course, if you were to have it rebuilt into a stereo/blue-tooth conversion, literally all of those heavy guts would be replaced by a some lightweight updated circuitry

a pricier but cool option is this OEM-based stereo/blue-tooth set from Antique Automobile Radio - https://radiosforoldcars.com :

Fractionally compact size compared to the OEM box and essentially negligible weight.

 

thanks - but I already have everything I need for my stereo - just trying to mount the original in the dash without screwing up the dash plastic and all that

 

I've used plumbers strap for many in dash radio supports.

 

thanks - attach it from the same bolt the lower bracket goes to and up to the center of the a/c vents? (Read that in another post here)

 

From the back view of the dash, here’s where that strap attaches

 

weird - it looks like a solid metal bar in the picture - which is what I thought it was in the line drawing of csm …

 

thanks tons for the picture - I get it now! Took me a bit looking at it to see what I was looking at - that helps tons!