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?