AY160 Jukebox, by Seeburg
AY-160 Jukebox, By Seeburg
The Seeburg AY-160 was produced in 1961 and was the last Seeburg to feature a visible loading mechanism.
I happened across this beauty at a SuperAuctions Chicagoland show. It was one of the last items of the day, dirty, the mechanism was recently thrown back into place (the mounting nuts weren't even snugged down) and it contained no records, so nobody could tell for sure whether it worked or not. The bid started at $500 and went down, down, down as no one was interested.
Finally the auctioneer said "OK, can anyone give me $75 for this machine?" I had lousy luck buying vids that day and had a few extra bucks to spend so I figured, why not? I bought it.
I brought it home and disassembled it. It looked like it had about 29 years of bar smoke covering just about everything. I thought the insides of this machine were green.
Turns out that after a couple days, bucketloads of water and simple green, and lots of elbow grease, I managed to clean the nicotine from all of the inside panels and mechanisms.
They all were a very nice deep blue with silver flake.
Now the good part: when I put her all back together and filled her up with 45s, I flipped the power, coined her up, and watched as she loaded up a terrible 45 leftover from the 80s (Electric Avenue by Eddie Grant) and played it! Sweet!
Being that my wife likes it a lot, we decided to park it in the kitchen.
Her mother was very generous and donated her collection of Beatles, Rolling Stones, Doors, Who, and MoTown, so that my family wasn't forced to listen to "Ewok Celebration!" and other such musical disasters. Actually the music is all "period" for the machine, which is very cool.
To Do:
Well this unit is missing the side medallions, the original top glass and some decals. I have found a distributor that has all the parts I need for around $200.
It will look sweet when I get those parts in and installed.
Also, the speakers have a definite "hum," probably something not grounded correctly in the amp or speakers themselves.
A new stylus should also be in order soon.
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