Quzar wrote:if you have any sort of wedges or chisels and a rock (or hammer) you could fake the stamping process. You could also try to straighten it out making it look less junky. For that I might recommend some strips of rubber (to safeguard each side), put a block of wood on each side (to do the same), then use a rubber mallet. I saw my father use a similar technique to flatten a delicate piece out once.
That sounds fairly similar to what I was doing before. It looked passable by itself, but when mounted on the radio along with everything else, it looked like an obvious kludge. I'm not sure what to do about the faceplate for the CD slot at this point; I'm tempted just to use gold paint, but that would be a pretty major cop-out.
On the plus side, the internals are almost finished. The wiring has all been tidied up inside, and of the three pots, 1.5 have been soldered. The PowerMate (for menu navigation) was soldered and tested last night, and I'm halfway through soldering the volume pot. Once that's finished, I'll solder the tone pot, and put the new knobs on. After that, the radio will be finished except for the accursed faceplate.