A Western Electric 500 telephone issue....
 

Picked up a couple black bakelite model 500 phones at the flea market last week, and got one all cleaned and shined up, and hooked it up, but I've got a weird issue.

Pick up the receiver, it has a dial tone for about a second, then *click*. If you keep listening for about 10 seconds, it'll do the same thing....dial tone, then *click*, dead.

I have Time Warner Cable for my phone service here. Don't think that's the issue, as I have another WE rotary wall mount from the late 70s or early 80s in regular use. This model I'm trying to use is mid-50s....there's no date stamp on the bottom, but the components all have date codes from 1954-1957.

Ideas or thoughts appreciated :)

I'd start with the leaf contacts where the receiver rests first. They may be resettling after the reciever is lifted or may need cleaning.

Does the second one do the same thing?

jr

Definitely the leaf contacts. I had the same issue with one of mine when I first bought it.

Haven't got to the other one yet, the cords were shot, so it's still apart.

I'll give the leaf contacts a go and post my progress. Thanks!

Its the signal level put out by your cable phone thing. Older phones use a lot more juice to run all of it, the ringer, the dc for audio, so it may be the cable box sensing what it thinks is a short and cutting off and resetting & trying again. I believe this was discussed before somewhere....

That's more of what I was thinking. I was going to check the contacts anyway, but the timing was so regular that it didn't seem right to me.

Wonder if there's a way I could make it work anyway :dunno:

try this
 

Classic 500s had a potted transformer type hybrid network. 500s closer to the end of production (70s-80s) had a small solid state circuit board. I wonder if the wall set you have is possibly the newer style and therefore draws less current. Maybe swapping hybrids from a newer 500 might help.

Also, of course when dealing with old phones and VOIP type systems, it helps to connect only one old phone at a time. Even when hung up, a 500 or similar phone exhibits a weird capacitive/inductive load due to the mechanical ringer.

Al

I have three rotary phones on my Time Warner VOIP system (2 40's era, one 60's) and there is enough juice to run all of them comfortably (though the ringer circuit is disconnected on my bedroom phone to keep me from wishing death on telemarketers and the like).

Can you use the rotary dials on that VoIP service?

Yes I can use my rotary phone to dial on my VOIP system, though numbers answered by automated phone systems (ie "...dial 2 for customer service, 3 to speak to an operator, 4 to have your line wire tapped by the NSA") don't seem to like rotary phones...

Touch Tone services have never supported pulse dial phones.

In the old days, it was the opposite. If you had basic service in the Bell System, DTMF tones wouldn't be accepted unless you paid extra for touch-tone service. This continued well into the '90s, at the least; one of our neighbors never bothered to upgrade past a 'basic black' WE 500 phone, and when I tried to use my Casio speed-dialer wristwatch with it, the touch-tones were completely ignored.

In terms of the modern era, there is still some support for pulse dialing with today's phone systems. We have Verizon FiOS service, and my various rotary dial phones dial out just fine with it. However, not all of them work correctly; whatever pulse-to-tone converter our network interface box uses is very strict about the rate of pulses, with a too-slow (or too-fast) rotary dial having most of its input disregarded. However, it does have its advantages; if I end up calling a number with a phone tree, when it asks to "Press 1 for English", I can dial a 1 with the rotary dial, and have it accepted.
-Adam

I switched a couple years ago from a regular old land line to Warner cable, i was surprised to find my 1940's vintage WE 300 still was able to dial out..haven't had any issues with it.

Ive never hard of them going bad.. but most phones do have a capacitor or two..Maybe they are bad?

I've had Time Warner Cable phone service for some time, and it works well with both phones in my apartment (both are Touch-Tone with capability to switch to pulse, if necessary). I haven't used dial phones in years; in fact, the last time I had a rotary phone was at my previous residence, about five years before I moved. The telephone company at the time (AT&T, IIRC) switched to touch-tone just about that time, and I was able to use a rotary dial phone with no problems, but I had switched to touch-tone by then so this wasn't an issue for me.

However, these days I just might have trouble with rotary phones on today's touch-tone service, for reasons others have mentioned. I have yet to use a rotary dial phone with the phone service I have now, mainly because I don't have dial phones anymore (got rid of them years ago and didn't look back), so I cannot comment on how well or how poorly they work with modern digital phone lines. My best guess is that, as another VK member has mentioned, dial phones could well be incompatible with digital lines by virtue of the difference in dialing speeds.

In most cases, but not necessarily all, dial phones will not work with business phone systems that use menus to connect callers to different services, since these systems are almost always configured for touch-tone phones only. One VK member mentioned that he was able to use his 1940s-vintage dial phone on such a system, even to use the menu selections, but I think that is a rare exception; most of the time, modern systems will ignore dial pulses. If they do manage to connect to a modern phone system, it is entirely possible the dial could send the wrong signals; for instance, dialing 1 could cause the system to activate menu option 3 or any other option available on that line.

If you want to try your antique dial phone on a modern line, you can (the telephone company or your cable company won't mind or care unless the phone somehow damages their network, by virtue of a short or other problem), but don't expect it to work--well or at all. That is, you may be able to dial out and to receive calls as normal, but don't expect miracles as far as using these phones with business telephone systems goes; the experiment will almost always fail miserably. The VK member whose 1940s rotary phone does work on these sophisticated systems must have a phone with a dial that outputs pulses at just the right speed for his digital telephone line.

BTW, as an experiment, I tried about a month or so ago to to use my touch-tone phones in pulse mode; they dial out with no problems, but I still hear tones in the earpiece while dialing, just as I do with the phone in tone mode. The last time I tried this, I was expecting to hear dead silence, or at least clicks, while entering the number I was trying to reach on the keypad. :scratch2:

I switched to Comcast telephone service a few years ago and my rotary phones worked just fine with their modem--until they didn't one day last May. Some damn software upgrade came through and that was it, no more rotary. I finally got a refurbished Panasonic PBX to restore the old phones' functionality. It has the added benefits of A) making all the phones double as intercoms and B) greatly increasing the potential number of phones that can be in service at once. As if I need to expand another collection.... :scratch2:

I want one of those Western Electric card dialers with a rotary dial, but they're so darn expensive.

I still have a land line and probably will as long as they're available. Early adopter I'm not.

This is good to know! I have had a friend or two use Vonage, Ooma, or maybe Magic Jack devices, and I think I had read that rotary phones will not dial using those devices. Maybe the key is to have an actual company-provided VoIP service rather than the retail-store-bought boxes I mentioned.

For now, I still have real analog phone service combined with my high-speed Internet, and I like being able to make rotary-dial calls. Even to cell phones. :)

I got lucky with mine. I found it at a local flea market, sitting in the seller's 'overflow' booth (where they stuck things which didn't fit in their regular booth) along with a couple of other non-descript phones. I asked how much they wanted for it, and they said one dollar. :banana: It was missing the ringer, and the hookswitch was messed up, but both were easy fixes. Unfortunately, the card dialer part no longer dials out correctly; I'm guessing the contacts involved with its mechanism have gotten dirty, but I'm not entirely sure. Hopefully, it will someday grace my computer desk once more...

http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...carddialer.jpg