atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Telephone Repairs & Equipment Looking for vintage phone forum

I'm looking for advice on repairing a 70s-era Western Electric phone, and I thought I'd have no trouble finding a forum for phone collectors, but I've had no luck.

It seems like this forum is geared towards telecom professionals or I'd ask my questions here... Can anyone point me to a good site?

What phone and what's the problem. Did you try to google antique phone repair? Or just antique phones?

You may find the infomation your looking for at the Bell System Memorial Site

This isn't exactly an antique, I think that's what makes it difficult... But I did just find the singingwires group, and that might be helpful.

The problem I'm having is with one of the Design Line character phones which seems to use many of the components from the 2555B (35AH3D dial, 4228 network, P3A ringer, polarity guard) but I believe the hook switch is different - it has 8 wires. Although it doesn't show any obvious signs that it has been tampered with, the network was wired unlike anything I've seen in the schematics for other WE phones using these components, and it didn't work as expected when I got it.

The dialtone was barely audible, mic didn't seem to be working, and the dial produced loud, but off-key tones and it wouldn't dial out. The ringer worked normally. After finding the schematics on the Bell System Memorial page, I've managed to improve the situation a bit, but the dial now acts like there is a polarity issue (the keys mute the dial tone slightly, but do not produce any tones, I've tried swapping ring & tip with no effect.) I'm also lacking a schematic on how the polarity guard was originally wired.

On the plus side, I can at least answer incoming calls now. I can post a before and after rundown of the wiring layout if anyone is interested.

Many thanks

I found that one yesterday, thanks. They have most of the schematics I needed, but there are still some questions...

The singingwires Yahoo group looks good also, I'm crawling through their past messages now.

Thanks again!

The 'Design Line' series was wired pretty much like a normal 2500 (in the case of the TouchTone sets). However, TT dial pads can fail. The most common failures, in a standard Western Electric-made pad, is the death of the single transistor or, simply, bad solder joints or dirty contacts.

I've seen that you're already on the track of finding the info you need, so happy tweaking.

Had same problem, wired wrong, in BSP Station Service found soultion section 502-580-402

in Handset, the receiver is the 2 white wires regularlly, and Black and Red Transmitter, so if handset uses diffrent colors for tranmitter & receiver make appropriate change.

Wireing Handset to either 425 or 4228 Network.
Black goes to B, Red and one White goes to R, and finally the other white goes to GN.

When I opened My handset in the decora set the black & shared red went to receiver and shared red and white to transmitter (I have cloth 3 wire handset cord on decora set)

Regarding the OP's question about the switch hook having eight wires:

The slate wire was a normally closed contact with yellow being common and brown being normally open. It was no longer used, so they did away with it.

There was another set of normally open contacts added (two blue wires). This was to permit easier A lead modification.