So the newest edition of my collection is a Jukebox. It’s sort of a long story, but essentially I found some lady selling this on Craigslist. She said they had it for a long time and needed cash now! I gave them a call since they had it listed for $200 and Jukeboxes are very pricey. They were even more shady on the phone with the description of it but then she said I could have it for $100 if I came and got it that day. So I picked up my friend and off we went. I figured even if it was badly broken I could piece it out and get more than $100 back.
So when we pulled into their trailer park and found their trailer (true story) they were all sitting outside drinking some Milwaukee’s Best Ice and were kind enough to offer us some… They then showed it to us in the indoor/outdoor part of their trailer and it was pretty damn dirty and way bigger than expected. We were able to get it into my car with an inch to spare on each side, this thing is 42″ wide and 54″ high – not to mention it weighs over 350 lbs.
We got it back to my place and plugged it in, it sort of turned on and we played with it for a bit but couldn’t get it to work right. After a few days of cleaning it and working on it, it works pretty much perfectly minus a few small lights and the dollar bill acceptor. Thanks to a guy I “know” who has a vinyl jewelry company I was made aware of the tool I need to modify modern records to fit a jukebox (it’s called a dinker…). So I am in the process of having one of them shipped from the U.K. to start packing in some Cave In and other 7″ records I have. Surprisingly, it came with a ton of great classic rock records which will be cleaned up and reused in it.
I’m in the process of completely restoring it but here are some pictures and videos of it:
You can see some lights are out in the bottom and top but I was able to get replacement ones off of eBay.
I started redoing the title strips (The Beatles & Black Sabbath) to give it a more uniform look.
- Rowe AMI R-91 Jukebox playing Led Zeppelin – The Immigrant Song
- Mechanics of a Rowe AMI R-91 Jukebox
PS- I found $2 in quarters in the change compartment, so really, it only cost me $98. More to come. Play Gretzky Table Hockey.
