User:Danielwreyes/section inserts
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Last updated: 2011-12-09 Scosche
Incubator for Industry Innovators
[edit]In the 1980s, Scosche employed several up and coming designers, including Daniel Reyes, Rob Putman, and Roy Nimpoeno. These were early days in the history of modern autosound, and these design pioneers left their stamp on the industry.
The birth of multi kits
[edit]The first Scosche product was a radio adapter kit designed to fit the 1982 GM J model cars, which included the Chevrolet Cavalier, Pontiac J2000, and Cadillac Cimarron. The adapter kits were commissioned by Alpine Electronics for their new to the market digital equalizers and head units.
Historically, auto radios had a central face and one knob on each side of the face, for volume and tuning. The shafts that the knobs were attached to were threaded and used to hold the radio to the dashboard.
The new GM radio was a rectangular box and the opening in the dashboard was an empty rectangle with no way to secure an aftermarket radio with shafts to it. The J model had a bent metal bracket screwed to the top and that was screwed to the subdash. The new adapter for Alpine was a plastic panel with openings to mount the new radio and with ears molded at the top.
Not long after this, GM released the A model cars, which used this same boxy radio, but with different mounting brackets in a different location on the radio. It looked like GM was going to make different versions for each model (eventually they made 26 versions). This created a problem for molded mounting kits; tooling would get to be very expensive and a great number of parts would have to be inventoried. The market leaders for radio installation kits, at that time American International and Ampersand, made metal frames duplicating the GM radio housing, and added plastic faceplates. Using this required having the correct metal brackets on hand.
At around this time, Fujitsu Ten, Blaupunkt, and Alpine were introducing DIN chassis radios that just did not fit in these metal adapters.
Looking for a solution, Daniel Reyes, developed an inverted strategy for a new adapter kit. Rather than build one kit for each GM car, why not build one kit for all GM cars? Instead of using one set of mounting provisions and twenty-six brackets, why not use one set of brackets and a series of slots? Roger Alves was so confident in this design that tooling started right away, and the kit was introduced at the 1984 CES. This kit proved to be so effective that even after it was patented (US patent #4462564) Ampersand copied it. American International spent 3 years developing a version with plug in rectangles.
Scosche, and Daniel Reyes, immediately followed up with a Ford/Chrysler multi kit (US patent #4560124), which Metra knocked off almost immediately.
The race to build multi kits was on.