Rip Records Straight to Your iPod.

DEPT: You Built What?!

INVESTIGATOR: PAUL WALLICH

TECH: Vinyl-converting iPod dock

TIME: 30 hours

COST: $1,015

PRACTICAL POPCORN

Most iPod docks just sit on a desk and connect to the nearest computer. Mister Jalopy's dock sits in the garage where he restores classic cars, so to make it blend in a little better, he fitted it into a converted Farnsworth radio console from the 1960s. Then he stuffed in a turntable, a tuner/amplifier, a Mac Mini, and a handful of USB widgets. Now he can play a record, and the songs will be automatically imported to the Mini and transferred to the iPod. Just for fun, he threw in a Radio Shark AM/FM antenna that can tune in and record radio to the Mini. And in keeping with the seamless melding of old and new, the station-preset buttons on the original tuner control play, skip and other functions on the iPod.

Mister Jalopy (his carefully guarded nom de Net) says that this last hack was the hardest one. It required running wires from the old buttons to a tiny circuit board ripped out of a Griffin AirClick remote-control unit, which sends radio-frequency signals to a matching receiver plugged into the iPod. But now, with the finicky work done, he can go to local garage sales and fill his iPod with classic tracks, 12 songs for a quarter.