Touchtone Covers and Boxes

[scottfannin]

I've been delighted with the advice available on this forum on how to connect a touch tone pad to an old wooden wall phone or other old phones.  I've got it working, easy to make, and small.  All of these articles show a plastic grid over the buttons, shaved down to fit a slanted project box.  They make like you go to your (mostly now defunct) local Radio Shack and just buy a few and you're ready to go.  I'm not seeing the boxes anywhere and rarely seeing the grid covers.  I can make the boxes, since I mostly want them to match the phones anyhow, like a sub sub subset thing, with hardwood scraps.  Rather buy them but I'm capable of making them.  But the grid piece, I see for maybe $12 each on a good day.  That's rather dear, particularly when whole off-brand desk phones go for maybe $15 at local thrift/junk shops and could just be sacrificed while getting some screws and wires too.  Anyone know where to get these plastic angled project boxes or even more importantly, a package of the button grids for a reasonable price?

[scottfannin]

Replying to my own post just to show what I found to be possible.  Got key covers by just stalking eBay until I found a deal I could live with.  Been studying woodworking while in perpetual quarantine/plague bunker.  Used articles on here and advice and parts from Steve Hilsz to figure out the guts.  It's basically all held to the top piece with brackets made from plumbing pipe straps that are hard enough not to bend by hand but soft enough to bend in a vise.  I shaped them with aircraft shears and a knockoff dremel tool.  If you're only making it an add-on to the line, wiring the touchtone pad is much easier than when integrating it into a 2500.  Only weird thing is that it works consistently with anti-sidetone circuit devices but numbers below 7 fail if the phone is sidetone, presumably because some sort of feedback influences the frequency generated too much.  The cost, well, ridiculous if you count like 100 hours of research and testing but that really wasn't the point anyhow. 

[FABphones]

In future years phone collectors will be baffled as to how these came to exist.
Nicely done.