Lets go BACK, BACK, BACK into time. Cave men. Cave women. Neanderthal.  Talk about your antiques that aren't worth much anymore. Here's your standard cassette adapter. This is a bit later model, but for a hot 20 years, this was the 8-Track to Tape adapter of it's time. That was the even shorter short lived way to play tape casettes in 8 track tape decks that otherwise would have been Pontiac ashtrays.

In the early 1980's until the late 1990s, tape decks became the norm in cars. Of course, if you has a '79 Chevette or Monza, you could buy a $10 radio from Tokyo Shapiro. Good luck trying to install it in the dash. I mean we used to sell 50 different dash conversion kits for after market stereos.  For a little more (or in some cases a LOT more) money, you could easily? install a Pioneer or Alpine or some other stereo. Never mind the holes you had to cut for the speakers. Ahhh, but slowly and surely compact disc player portables became cheaper and more and more of us had to either convert the tape deck or copy everything to cassette. Fun for awhile, pain in the ass mostly.

This little device helped us all get our compact discs on. Of course, for me, I didn't have a portable CD until they got really cheap and could play MP3's as well. What did I get this for? I had installed a JVC deck in my '89 Dodge Omni America and later my '94 Saturn SL. Both of those were the cheapest cars you could buy and both came with AM/FM stereos that with a kit, were replaced with my JVC. About a year after putting it in my Saturn, the tape deck failed. So, I got one of these so I could use a walkman stereo to play tapes. It worked like a champ. When the Saturn got destroyed, I thought about taking the JVC out, but decided to let it die peacefully. 

Here's the business end. I believe the "head" in this was plastic. It touched the heads of your tape deck and transferred the sound through the heads. If it was steel head to steel head, I'd imagine the wear and tear on your tape deck would be horrible. Of course, this still was a lot of wear and tear, the gears for the tape deck would run and run trying to pull the tape through that didn't exist. Maybe you should buy a $400 in dash CD player ya bastard.

I had to replace the wires on this twice. A quick snip of cheap headphones and a little solder, and this thing still works like a champ and still comes in handy. No it doesn't come in handy. You caught me in a lie. I should go now. It was great tech. Really. You can use it now for an MP3 player or cell phone. Hell, they are going to make cars without AM radio soon. Cell phones are taking over the whirled. Enjoy your $100 a month. Mine plays Tetris (C)

Arf! -Ricochet

PS: I like the fact that a BEER company's exclusive technology was used to create this. Schotz Beer. I still wish they made that. It was a great burp beer.