In this part of the US, the weather this last weekend turned out to be a bust, so instead of working on the pinball machines in my gameroom, I decided to attempt a different project. I bought a 1971 Wurlitzer Zodiac (3500 series) jukebox on CL for $50. It barely worked, and needed a lot of time to get everything going again, but it was in sound condition, and I saw that it had some potential:

Forgive me for the lack of pictures, but I hardly thought that I'd be writing up something on these boards while doing this little weekend project.

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To my dismay, the amount of repair literature out there for these types of things is considerably more limited than what is found in the pinball hobby, but I went and ordered an amplifier rebuild kit to replace those dried up caps and burnt out transistors. The kit contained 4 matched amplifier transistors that were NOS (since they do not make new replacements for them anymore). I attempted to repair the mechanism that rotates the 45s (as it had gummed up and stopped turning), but everything else seemed fine.

Anyway, after all my hard work, I was left with a jukebox that worked exactly as poorly as I started out and all my hard work went down the tubes. I had several of my buddies haul this monstrosity into my house already, so I was committed to getting it working, but I was lost, destitute, depressed, and out of ideas. That was, until I went to Goodwill.

While at Goodwill, I thought of the idea to take an old stereo system, rip out the amp, and install it inside the jukebox. I thought about it, but then realized that doing so would be more hassle than its worth. So instead, I took to the internet, bought a standalone amplifier and an amazon basics bluetooth audio adapter:

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I simply hard wired the amplifier directly into the existing speakers, and have the bluetooth adapter wired into the amplifier. It turns out that the el-cheapo amp from china was not nearly powerful enough to drive those huge speakers in the jukebox, so I went and ordered a more powerful tube amp:

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I used an old computer power supply housing to hold a small pre-amp that drives the main (red) analog tube amplifier. This setup sounds really really nice, and coupled with the bluetooth adapter, I've essentially created a massive bluetooth speaker that I connect to my amazon prime music library. Everything runs from the power that is supplied internally through the jukebox, so that there is only one plug, and a line switch to turn the thing on and off.

Note, I've left everything intact within the jukebox, so it can easily be converted back over to playing 45s once I get the know-how to do so, but for now, it is quite a nice sounding bluetooth jukebox that we really enjoy when company is over.

The overall future plans for this endeavor is to find a jukebox style app that will allow people to tap into a music library and "request" songs on either their smart phones or using the library on an ipad or something of that nature.

Hope you guys enjoyed this mini write up!

Be well, everyone.
-Max