What’s this ? Found in my glove box
 

I found this little guy in my glove box . 67 gto

Can anyone tell me what it is ?

Looks like maybe some residue on that razor blade, someone was doin' some lines with it years ago?

That was me yesterday. The whole car is torn apart now

ebay!

That is an adapter to put into a 4-track tape cartridge so it will play in an 8-track player.

Wow !! Thanks

That practically sounds believable to my youthful ears.
Are you bullshanking us ?? :confused2

omg
HahahaHAHAhaHaha

That is what it is. Adapter from 4 track to 8 track. I haven't seen one of those for 40 years. The AR logo stands for Automatic Radio.

I could have used that in the 1970's, the 63 Bonneville I owned then had a 4-Track player. It only came with 3 Tapes and I didn't like 2 of them. I could have played all my 8-tracks in it. Never knew they existed.

It was the other way around - that adapter let you listen to 4 tracks in an 8 track player.


I still have the Automatic Radio 8 track player I got for Christmas as a teenager (I had it in my '61 Catalina back then) and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure it came with one of those Gidget gadgets in the box.

That thing is cool! Never heard of such a thing, didn't even know they made 4 track cartridges!! It should be in a museum. Cant be more than one of them out there by now.

This is pretty cool .
Maybe you can post a picture of it . I can tell something was mounted on the carpet right in front of the 4 speed shifter. My car still has the original carpet,

Thanks guys

I found this ad on eBay . I’m thinking that device was mounted in my car in front of the 4 speed . ...I could be wrong though

One more thing I see . This product is from Massachusetts.. that’s where my car came from and was built in Framingham

My BIL had a 4 track tape player he received for a birthday present. One of the tapes was Leonard Nimoy singing.....

Collectible for sure.

Back in the late sixties I had. Simca that had a 4 track player it . If I were too mention that today, probably no one would know they even existed. My wife doesn’t, and sometimes I even questioned whether my memory was accurate.

It's sort of a curiosity today, but not worth much or collectible unless you happen to have some 4 track tapes sitting around. They were a pretty short fad that pretty much went away about five minutes after 8 tracks were introduced.

For those who have never seen one, unlike an 8 track where you stuck it into a slot on the front, a 4 track cartridge sort of sat on top of the player.

Muntz was the main brand, this is a picture of their player:

http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/...7&d=1574453422

Besides the Gidget, the other things in the ad you posted actually would slide into the slot on an 8 track player so you could listen to the radio, if you didn't already have one in your car - back then most cars didn't have FM, and quite a few didn't have radios at all.

My Automatic Radio 8 track player looked like this. It mounted under the dash on a heavy steel bracket, and was removable; you'd take it out of the car so people couldn't steal it. I imagine they had other models that did mount on the trans tunnel.

http://forums.maxperformanceinc.com/...8&d=1574453434

My first job out of engineering school was at a company that built the recording and playback tape heads that went inside 8 track players. By the time I got there, 8 tracks were basically dead and they had moved on to building the heads that went in computer hard drives and floppy disk drives, but we still had a ton of old 8 track stuff sitting around. My job was designing and building the automated manufacturing and testing machines used to make the heads, and we would store the machine programs on 8 track tapes - when you walked through the production area, every machine or console had a 8 track player sticking out of the front panel. I always thought it was pretty funny. :)

Ok, I've heard of '4 track' before, and heard that it was similar to '8 track', but this adapter and discussion made me look it up;

4-Track (youtube) video

interesting!

not captivating, but interesting!

Now, my question is this;
Were '4 tracks' as prone to over tightening and breaking at the glued ends as '8 tracks'?

[QUOTE=Stuart;6083827]It was the other way around - that adapter let you listen to 4 tracks in an 8 track player.


Got it, would not have helped me at all unless I only wanted to listen to that Buddy Holly 4-track. The other 2 were late 50's Country that I didn't care for.

Melrose, MA - 12 minutes from where I'm sitting right now :) Apartment buildings now

You didn’t happen to ever see a original red 67 gto HO floating around in the area?

Mention what??? The Simca or the 4 track player?

Lol. I was talking about the 4 track but now that You mentioned it, I’m sure most people wouldn’t know what a Simca was. It was a Small car made in France. Mine was the only one in my area that I knew of.

Wasn't the 4-track invented by Lear of Lear jet fame?

I had a 4 Track house player. It was the Beta Max of the day. Someone has to lose...

Madman Muntz came up with the 4 track. Bill Lear came up with the 8 track. There's a short history of the two types here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo-Pak

Muntz also made cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntz_Car_Company

I grew up in the 8-track era and never heard of a 4-track cartridge.

Oh yeah, the tape looked exactly like an 8-track except scaled down.

4-track cartridges had a hole in the bottom and when placed in the player you pulled or pushed a lever that rotated the driven wheel into the capstan thereby advancing the tape. Also, 4-tracks had only 2 channel pickups and 2 programs on each tape, while 8-tracks were 4 channel w/ 4 programs and the driven wheel was built into the cartridge

how is that even possible? :confused:

I grew up in what might be considered the Compact Disc era, even though when I started buying music, it was on Cassette format... and I heard of this!?
I heard of Reel to Reel, but until quite recently I had never seen one in person.

I'm sharing this just for fun;
My first albums I bought (in order; in all bought in while in grade 6) were:
Bon Jovi; Slippery When Wet
Def Leppard; Hysteria
Guns 'N Roses; Appetite for Destruction

The first two were bought a couple years after their initial release;
I remember going all over downtown Winnipeg with my cousin trying to find a copy of 'Slippery When Wet' at a price I could afford - when everyone had 'New Jersey' on sale at a price I could afford...
Earlier that same year I remember being busted by my mom after the fact for sneaking out of the house one day in what might be called "Joe Elliot jeans" (pictured below)
Yet later that year I remember one school yard argument with a classmate;
He insisted the name of the band was 'Paradise City', and wouldn't hear anything to the contrary.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/91/5f/67/9...0a054ef90e.jpg

lol

ah, the late 1980's!

/tangent

;)

There were 4-track tapes available that were very large, maybe 6x8 and they would play for 2 hours. You could go to the local Muntz dealer and they would record whatever music you desired on the tapes. I had a really nice (and really large) Craig 4/8 track player that some low life stole out of the GTO in 1970 at the local junior college. He also slit the rubber window seal off the rear quarter window to get to the lock plunger. May he rot in hell...

I do like the analog and the reels, but don't think I'll go back to 8 tracks. 50 year old decks need rehab / rebuilt, no matter the type.

For a VERY brief time in 1969, I owned a Simca Aronde. Only bought it as stop gap car (didn't have any money in those days - Come to think of it, I STILL don't have any money). But it was cheap and very reliable small car. I think the only expense I had over about a 4 month period was putting petrol in it. Don't even remember changing the oil. Loaned it to a friend to go to Uni, it got stolen. Never saw it again. (But I still have my friend:D)

Me too. I thought I was the cats meow when I got a stereo for Christmas that had the ability to record the album onto a blank 8 track! My older brother was an audiophile and had a dynamite setup complete with a very expensive reel to reel. Another brother had a 'best technology' of the day tape player in his truck. It was both 8 track and cassette.

Those Automatic Radio 8 tracks really sounded nice. I had a few of them. Panasonic really took the 8 track to the top though.. Some of those units from the 80s were spectacular. The speed and size of the tape gave them the ability to reproduce sound decently, better then cassette in my opinion.. I also have an Akai recorder..

The only exposure i had to 4-track tapes was about 1970 or 71 when my Dad was loading a big box full of them into his car from my grandparents house - to throw into the dumpster where he worked.

They looked normal to me [like an 8-track best i remember at about 7 y.o.]

Why are they trashing all these ?
Old 4-tracks son, can't play them anymore .

That was the first and last time i ever heard anything about a 4-track tape.
They sure died fast and hard

I ran 8-tracks up through about 81 or 82.
Later in life when i learned Pontiac offered cassette players starting in 1971 or 1972 , i was kind of shocked by that.

I bought my first cassette player in 70 and mounted it under the dash of my 60 Ford. My first tapes were by Carol King, Lee Michaels, Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin.
During my first Vietnam deployment I had bought a new Sony cassette player that didn't require manually flipping to play the other side. Its almost as big as the laptop I'm typing on. I still have it and may put it into the Goat when the restoration is complete. Like the ads say; "Ran when I parked it 30 years ago" lol

Still have my Muntz 4 track from 1965. Needs drive belt Also Muntz 4-8 track from 69 era. Plus all the tapes from 60s era. $$$$$

Hey

If anyone has a actual use for this just let me know and I’ll send it to you ..just pay the shipping or buy me a beer

Looks like a micro-switch like maybe from a shifter.

This little goody is called a "Gidget". It was made by a company called Automatic Radio. They made 4 track players, and 8 track players (using the correct cartridges, with 1/4 tape in them in a continuous loop.) This was in the 60s and early 70s. I bought my first 8 track player in 1967, and installed it in my dads 1966 Grand Prix. It had a slide in mount, with a key lock, so I just removed it after I was finished driving the car. As you can imagine, I am fairly old now, I will be 70 this coming June, anyway, the Gidget's function was to snap in to the round hole in the bottom of a 4 track cartridge, and function as the capstan wheel, as 4 track cartridges had no built in capstan pinch roller, that was part of a 4 track player, it would just pop up from below. So, Automatic Radio invented the Gidget for the owner of the more modern 8 track players to pop this into one of their 4 track cartridges, and be able to play it in an 8 track player, as all 8 track cartridges had their own rubber capstan roller inside them from the factory where they were made. 4 track cartridges did not. So, this was a nifty little adapter that allowed you to play an older 4 track cartridge in an 8 track player. Hope you can visualize this! You might look up some 4 and 8 track cartridges and players on ebay to check it out!