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Image showing a 1978 Sony ST-A3A AM/FM tuner with new solid walnut side panels.
1978 Sony ST-A3A AM/FM tuner with new solid walnut side panels.

Project Archive: Side Panels for Vintage HiFi Equipment

I wrote in March about a set of walnut floor speaker stands I made for a customer. He recently asked me to replace the worn out side panels on his 1978 Sony ST-A3A AM/FM tuner with solid walnut to match the stands. He found the tuner at a thrift store and the edge veneers had peeled off the original particleboard side panels. This was a simple and fun project – rectangular panels with carefully positioned and counterbored mounting holes, and a little rabbet routed into the front edge to accommodate the control panel. Honestly, the hardest part was trying to find decent quality walnut that was milled from a mature tree and wasn't half sapwood*. (That didn't work out very well so I had to be very careful about how I used the wood I had. On the plus side, I got a pretty cool bookmatched panel out of the remainder.)

I was careful to match all dimensions to the originals so the panels would be as close to a perfect reproduction as possible. The mounting holes and counterbores seem unnecessarily large at first, but the original manufacturing tolerances were probably a bit loose and 48 years of handling certainly hasn't helped. Larger holes allow a bit of play to better align the side panels to the control panel.

An image showing the large counterbores in the side panels.
A test fit before finishing demonstrates the need for large counterbores in the side panels.
An image showing the alignment of the side panel to the control panel.
Alignment of the side panel to the control panel. For scale, the control panel is about 3mm (1/8") thick.

The Instagram reel shows how much this simple upgrade improved the tuner's appearance:

*This is becoming a real problem. It seems like we need walnut to lose popularity for a while so stocks can recover, but it's hard to say no to a species that looks so good and is so easy to work.

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