For starters -- yes, I'll admit it. I'm a dealer, specializing in vintage car radios. However this is not spam; I've got a dilemma, and it's probably not foreign to many of you here.
A customer sent me a radio from a 57 Golden Hawk. I have yet to begin working on it, simply because the glass dial has the dial markings silk-screened on it, and these numbers have pretty much flaked off. I've seen this problem before, mainly with earlier Philco radios from the 50-51 bullet nose cars, but never have I seen it so bad that it is simply unusable.
A lot of cars have dial markings on the glass. In most cases these are clear plastic with the numbers etched in. Some even use real glass with the etched numbers. These are easy -- simply remove the rest of the paint with Wesley's Bleche Wite, repaint, and clean off the excess. But these are silk-screened, and once gone there is no way to reconstruct this dial.
A lot of repro parts are available out there, even for radios. I have done an exhaustive search for such a dial, and have come up empty. One dealer told me of a Dan Skidmore who supposedly has repro dials, but I've called several times with no answer. As for making one, repro dials for some radios (Chevy trucks for example) are made by printing the white lettering onto a clear sticky transparency and attaching it to the back of a plain glass. That might work here, as I believe there is enough material to photograph it, put it on a computer screen, and recreate the artwork using Photoshop. But nobody seems to have the means of printing in white. This includes a number of people who actually specialize in reproducing old radio dials -- they can't reproduce this one.
Has anyone here found such a source? Does anyone here have ideas? The only answer so far has been to locate another radio and steal the glass -- assuming it's better, but that's not an acceptable answer if we want to preserve as many of these as we can. I can't believe everyone reading this has a Studebaker with a perfect silk-screened dial on the radio.
All comments are appreciated.