Re: I just restored a pre-production AE radio for Nissan

I was approached by a friend who works for Nissan North America a couple of months ago to see if I would be interested in restoring the OEM radio/cassette combo out of the AE that Nissan has in their car collection up at corporate in Tennessee. I repaired/refurbished the unit and sent it, along with a set of my repro AE mats (can you believe it?!) back to them today.

A couple of things of interest. The car that this came out of was, what I would consider, a pre-production unit with a 10/83 build date (and approximately 9000 miles on the odometer) as confirmed by Nissan FAST. Regular AE production was from 12/83 to 3/84. Secondly, the Clarion unit had serial number 0000032 which is the lowest I've ever seen in almost ten years of restoring these units.
I was quite surprised that none of the 120-plus electrolytic capacitors were leaking and/or bad; I was equally surprised that neither of the cassette deck mechanism belts had turned to goo, although I replaced the capstan belt just for caution sake. The main/tuner board was bad and I was not able to repair it but I swapped in a rebuilt spare parts board and replaced the LCD display unit which brought her back to good working order.

There was no FCC sticker or cabling diagram on the chassis (like the regular production units); there were also some subtle differences on some of the printed circuit boards like hard wired-in discrete components here and there and cut traces, jumpers, etc.

I really feel like it was an honor to be asked to do this; I am proud, thusly, of my contribution to keep an "early" AE working as it should.

Greg