[alfa] Spider boots and radios, FWIW

[Pottree@xxxxxxx]

A question was posed about which glue to use on a part for a 91 Spider 
tonneau.  I confess from the Q I was not positive which part is in question, but it 
could be the plastic forks at the front, which slide down to clamp onto the 
folded top frame.  If so, I believe they were originally attached to a metal 
base inside the "hard" tonneau with pop rivets.  The forks are subject to 
breaking.  I needed to replace a broken one once and removed the old pop rivets, 
leaving 4 small holes which correspond to the holes in the base of the fork.  I 
used 4 small, short screws w/ nuts (can't recall the exact size) and that's 
worked fine for several years.

Thinking back even further into the dim past, I recall that the Spiders in 
the US about 30 or 35 years ago came with a radio blanking plate in the dash 
bearing the handsome insignia of Pininfarina.  This had been removed on my 71 by 
either a dealer or a PO, and installed instead was a Becker Mexico mono AM/FM 
radio with, I think, 5 pushbutton presets.  The extremely unremarkable speaker 
was screwed on under the dash and behind the center console, firing down at 
the passenger's feet.  The antenna cable was snaked under the rubber floor mat 
and eventually (on this example) out to the rear deck, just forward of the 
trunk lid, where the antenna was mounted inboard of the fender's curve (IOW, a 
weird place).  Still, it worked remarkable well.  The poor sound quality was 
passable in a car that was almost always open anyway, and the radio pulled very 
strongly in canyon areas where other car radios I had would lose the signal.  
Anyway, I kinda recall looking into the choice of this particular aftermarket 
job and learning the Becker was chosen because it was the model that would fit 
the slot; perhaps that meant it was the one first or most easily located that 
was made in metric units, but who knows?

Charlie
LA, CA, USA

91 Spider
94 164LS
84 GTV6
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