New rotary phone

[kirbyman65]

I got this at my local thrift shop on their “vintage day” it was a decent price so i decided to buy it (along with a royal hand vac) I’ve tried to clean it up, but I could use some tips on how to rewire the phone jack on it.

 

[justjunque]

Beautiful phone! And, one of my favorite colors! Do you know what year it was made?
I’ve never converted one from hardwired to modular, but I would imagine it can be done. There are websites and eBay sellers who specialize in vintage phones. Someone with more knowledge than myself should certainly be able to help you out.
I’m guessing that it’s a Western Electric. As huge as they were, I would think there would be plenty of bits and pieces still available to accomplish what you need.
Good luck! I hope you have fun with it!

Barry

 

[kirbyman65]

I think I do

It has a date 5-70 on it so I would assume it’s from may 1970

 

[human]

Those old Western Electric phones were darn near indestructible. I had one for a long time that was made in 1957, black with a black metal dial and a straight handset cord. My dad picked up a wall phone that same government green color at a church rummage sale about 20 years ago for a whopping 75 cents. The last time I saw the thing, it was hanging in their garage, hooked up and fully operational, because Dad kept leaving the cordless phone out there.

 

[justjunque]

I have two black 1950s versions with the metal dial. One belonged to my grandmother, probably since it was new. The other one, I picked up at a thrift store.
I just noticed that the one from the thrift store has some sort of adapter on the end of the wall cord, that allows it to plug into a modular jack.
So, J, (Kirbyman65), they might not be easy to find any more, but that's one thing you could look for. I would imagine you just match up the colors of the wires, and viola. You have a modular plug!

 

[human]

I had one of those adapters on my black '57 phone. It had a male modular plug on one end and a female four-prong on the other with about six inches of wire in between. They used to sell them all over the place for like $3 or $4 back in the late '70s and into the '80s. I haven't seen one in forever.

That green phone may have been the main phone for the house. The phone company, back when it was THE phone company, used to require one phone to be hard wired into the house. That may be why it doesn't have a plug on the end. The phones with the four-prong plugs were the "extension" phones.

As I've been typing this, I had a kind of out-of-the-box idea. One thing that I do still see in stores is surface mount female modular plugs. Just put one of those on the end of the cord of the green phone and then plug a contemporary modular cable into it and into the wall. Voila! Connection made.

 

[justjunque]

Edgar,

I wasn’t familiar with those adapters that you described. But, I believe there are several of them currently listed on eBay. So, that’s certainly an option for the OP.
The one on my thrift store phone is entirely different.
Those other adapters look a little bit like the converters that I have to use on my rotary phones so that they can dial out. Our phone service doesn’t support rotary dialing. (pulse?) So it has to be converted to tone.

 

[texaskirbyguy]

Great color - have not seen that one much.
You can certainly wire that thing up to work - lots of info online.
You can even buy and adapter that will allow it to work on a touchtone line so it will be fully functional. I need to do this with a phone I have.

The tech who installed fiber at my house last month said he knows a guy who has a few thousand of those old phone, so if anyone in my area needs parts or phones, I can see what he has and is willing to part with.
Sadly I had to part with my copper POTS line last month after the overhead wiring was destroyed a few blocks away. Finally had to go to fiber as it was too expensive to fix and I was one of two in the area still on copper POTS.

 

[human]

I talked with my almost 90-year-old mother last weekend, and she told the power had been out at her apartment for a couple of hours that afternoon, so she couldn't use her cordless landline phones, and had forgotten to charge her cell, so she felt quite isolated during that incident. While I was on the phone with her, I ordered her a modern interpretation of an AT&T Trimline phone off of Amazon, one that did not require any external power source. It arrived a couple of days later, but it hadn't survived shipping. A big chunk was broken off of the base, so back it went, and onto eBay I went to find an honest-to-goodness Western Electric Trimline phone. What I came up with was a real artifact of '70s kitsch, a matched pair--a wall phone and a tabletop phone--in burnt orange, yikes! I figured with a pair of them, the odds were better than even that at least one would work properly, and if need be, I could cannibalize parts to create one from the two. Sometimes, old school is the best school!

 

[centralsweeper63]

Very cool!

 

[cheesewonton]

We keep an old Western Electric first generation touch tone phone for the same reason. They run on line power when the power is out.

 

[centralsweeper63]

They ripped the lines out over here.