Ebay Find. AE Touchtone Three Slot.

[trainman]

Ok. I have no idea what the model number is. Did I do good for 116.00?  Dated 1969.

[Stan S]

It's an Automatic Electric LPC72-55.
Stan S.

[trainman]

Thanks Stan.

Is this a prepay or postpay model?  My guess is prepay.

[Stan S]

Its got a single coil prepay coin relay, so it's a prepay phone.
AE never manufactured a single coil semipostpay coin relay, only double coil.
When semipostpay AEs were upgraded, the double coil semipostpay coin relays were trashed
and 'after market' Teltronics boards were installed.

Connect the phone to a phone line. L1 and L2 are marked on the right edge of the bakelite strip with the screws.
You have two chances of it even breaking dial tone, never mind actually dialing a complete number.  Slim and none!

Those were the worst Touch Tone payphones ever made!

Stan S.

[trainman]

Worst TT phones made? Oh well. still 1/4 the price of any WE or NE three slotter out there.

I'll just hang this one in the basement, then.

[mentalstampede]

I have one of these. The keypad/oscillator assemblies are the Achilles Heel of these things. Unreliable and finicky.  Everything else is standard AE prepay, and as such works well.

[AE_Collector]

All early AE touchcall pads were poor or at least would become poor with use. My guess is that is what Stan is referring to, not that the actual phone itself is bad. At least it has its original insides! The very earliest AE touchpads had problems with the coils the generate the frequencies getting out of whack.

Our rehab shops did some investigating to try to determine what caused the AE touchpads to get flakey and came to the conclusion that microscopic particles of plastic were wearing off the sides of the buttons and the guides for the buttons with each push of and fouling up the contacts. AE didnt seem to have a plan to fix it so our shops eventually sourced another touchpad brand to put into AE TC sets being rehabbed.

Terry

[trainman]

Maybe a good cleaning will work since it wont receive continuous use.

And it was hard to see in the listing, but the bottom of the vault is all rusty.

[WEBellSystemChristian]

Those were the worst Touch Tone payphones ever made!

...which makes this one all the more valuable! I don't think much of anything in Touch Tone was made by AE, so I would bet this is fairly valuable. I can't remember ever seeing an AE 3-slot in TT before, congrats!

[Stan S]

...which makes this one all the more valuable!

Interesting use of logic.
If the value of the payphone is determined by how poorly it works, just hold on to it and the value will increase with age. as the payphone continues to self-destruct.
The reason (well, one of them) that the Touch Tone pad was flaky (sp?) wasn't because microscopic pieces were falling off the buttons. It was because the plastic that was used to mold the frame of the switch assembly GASSED. Made no difference if you used the payphone or not. Self-destruction was built into it at time of design. The gassing corroded the contacts.

Automatic Electric- where poor engineering was built in, not added on!

A second reason to make that payphone 'so valuable' was the fact that the contact points of the button assembly were needle thin pieces of wire. The wire was spot welded on a frame. With time the welds broke. Every now and then you would push a button and a thin needle like piece of wire would be pushed out of the side of the button and stab you in the finger. That was one of the contacts. Value going UP!

AE never fixed the problem because there was no fixing it. The entire switch assembly design was an engineering  disaster.

Now for the oscillator. It was a part for part copy of the Western Electric, except for the stability with changes in temperature. Of course this made no difference in the field.  If the switch assembly wasn't working properly, it really made no difference what frequencies the oscillator was producing.

If you are willing to do an engineering job you can replace the entire Touchcall unit with a tone pad from a Touch Tone Starlite. The pad in a Starlite is high quality, one piece (no separate oscillator) and will fit perfectly in the button window of the payphone. Of course you will have to figure out how to connect it electrically.

Yes, Touch Tone AEs are very rare. I think Jim (payphone installer) has dozens of these for sale:
http://tinyurl.com/has6ex2
They are new in the box and also guaranteed not to work either!

Tony
There is nothing to clean. If you attempt to take the switch assembly apart you will be greeted by an explosion of coil springs.
Those payphones are great for answering calls, not making them. They also make very effective doorstops.

Stan S.

[andre_janew]

Stan S, my dad felt the same way about a Farmall F-12 tractor with a Waukeshaw  engine!

[Stan the Man]

     Would stab my finger one time.. only once..  Personally, .. If it were mine, I'd be looking for that replacement keypad Stan S. mentioned.. but I'm crazy that way..

StanT

[Stan S]

To be fair, it's always easier being a 'Monday Morning Quarterback' than an actual player.

My comments about the Automatic Electric LPC72-55 payphone are in hindsight, 50 years after the fact. In reality all the first generation 3-slot Touch Tone payphones had problems that were self inflicted.

The Western Electric 10 button 1234G 3-slot which was the only Touch Tone 3 slot they ever manufactured had major problems. By the way, the 1234G with all its problems is one of the most coveted payphones by collectors.
It was designed and introduced when the Bell System had no intention of ever producing a 10 or 12 button 3-slot in any great quantity. In fact, work had begun years before on the Touch Tone single slot payphone.

The only reason for quickly designing and building them was to introduce Touch Tone dialing to the general public. Its introduction coincided with the 1964 Worlds Fair. 1234Gs were all over the fair grounds along with being installed all over every stop of the Long Island Railroad leading to the fair. The 1234Gs at the fair were painted white. I've been looking for one of those for 20 years. I doubt that any of them survived. (Hey, if anyone knows where there's one call me- PLEASE!) They were manufactured specifically for the fair and New York Telephone.

The problem with those payphones was that Western took a standard 1500 10 button Touch Tone deskset and stuck it in a payphone case. The oscillator board and the button assembly were separated. A wiring harness ran between them. So far no problem. However, nobody realized that there's a difference between a phone sitting inside on a desk at room temperature and a payphone mounted outside during a New York City winter or summer. The chances of finding one of those payphones that worked was virtually zero. New York Telephone was going crazy constantly replacing dead Touch Tone tops with ones that had been repaired.

The problem was that the payphones used pot core oscillators. The tops of the pot cores were glued to the bottoms. The only thing holding the two parts together was glue. The glue didn't like the New York City temperature swings so the tops of the pot cores popped off. After that your Touch Tone oscillator didn't and wasn't.
See below for more info on Pot Core Touch Tone Pads, if you have any interest. (Might as well get a plug in for my auction.)

http://tinyurl.com/h7bvd5p//

The 1234G was also the only Western Electric payphone I've ever seen that used 'off the shelf' hardware. The same hardware I was using for designs I was involved with at that time (made by Keystone, H.H. Smith and General Cement) was being used in those payphones. Western had never done that before. All the hardware in there 3-slots was specially made by, or for them.

The major difference between A Western and An Automatic Electric from a collector standpoint is that if a Western 1234G was working the last time you used it, when you came back it was still working. Could have been a day, a month or whenever- It WORKED! It was just the opposite with the AEs.

Stan S.

[trainman]

Stan, what was your career path?

Sounds like from a collecting standpoint ill leave my phone alone. Even though it was a bad design, its iriginal.

[trainman]

I appreciate the information. I didnt know any of that regarding touch tone payphones. And since I started collecting Worlds Fair items, the part about the Western payphones was interesting.