Touch-Tone WeCo Finds

[IIfx]

Well, went to the thrift store on Friday, and came back home with 2 things made by Western Electric (totally unexpected!)


First up, a yellow 2500, made in 1979, refurbished by AT&T in 1988. The plastic parts were replaced - dated 1984. Network, Dial Pad, Ringer dated 1979. Reversed polarity protection circuit is dated 1980. It cost $15.
Unfortunately someone replaced the handset cord with a cheap white third party one. I will be on the lookout for the original WeCo Yellow Modular for it. This phone works perfectly, and the ringer is even louder than the one in my 1957 500 set!


Second, a first-generation touch-tone trimline! It cost $2. This one unfortunately has some issues. It can make calls fine, volume is good, etc. But when a call is received, it fails to ring or rings very shortly, and cannot pick up successfully. It also causes my Comcast EMTA to make a hissing sound (probably not a good sign). The hissing happens when a call is incoming with the Trimline connected. The Trimline also stops all other phones from ringing.

I included a photo of the wiring block to see if its something obvious. Tried googling around, not much information on Trimline issues out there.

And as a final extra....

I got this off of ebay for $10 dollars total. Its a pretty awesome mug.

[twocvbloke]

Nice mugshot there...

[Jim Stettler]

Black trimlines are hard to find. That has the earlier brass ringer as well

Have you tried testing the phone with the ringer disconnected? If all the other issues clear up then it is your ringer.

Good find,
Jim

[poplar1]

On the Black Trimline, does it still have the original spade lugs on the wall end of the cord?

If so, you should be connecting only green (L1 terminal) and red (L2 terminal) for the dial tone and no ring.

Then, if that works OK (except for the ringer) add the ringer by connecting the green and yellow (from G terminal) line cord wires to the same screw in the wall jack.

Black (on 1 with a blue wire from the switch hook) and white (on 3 with white wire from the handset jack) should be used only for the lamp and would connect to a 6-8 Volts AC transformer. These 2 wires should never be connected to the telephone line (dial tone).

[IIfx]

The phone had been modified to have an RJ plug on the end of it.
Well, I just removed the ringer bell, and the problem persists. The phone can dial out fine, but if a call is incoming on the line, it causes the line to fail. My Comcast EMTA makes a hiss sound (which is probably a filtering capacitor) and the party calling hears light static on the line.

This is with the telephone directly connected to the EMTA. The 2500 and 500 work perfectly.

Very odd. 

[poplar1]

Sounds like they may have gotten carried away with the conversion to modular; it's not shown in the picture so I don't know. However, since your black ringer wire is on G in the picture, if the red and green wires only are spliced into the RJ11, then there's no way the phone will ring unless the yellow wire is also spliced into the RJ11. Is it possible they also spliced the black and white wires from the phone into the RJ11? You could also temporarily disconnect the blue switch hook wire from 1, the white handset jack wire from 3, and see what happens; this would disconnect the lamp in case it is connected somehow, maybe in the splice? (Someone took a probably perfectly good phone with original cords and tried to "improve" it.)

The phone had been modified to have an RJ plug on the end of it.
Well, I just removed the ringer bell, and the problem persists. The phone can dial out fine, but if a call is incoming on the line, it causes the line to fail. My Comcast EMTA makes a hiss sound (which is probably a filtering capacitor) and the party calling hears light static on the line.

This is with the telephone directly connected to the EMTA. The 2500 and 500 work perfectly.

Very odd. 

[IIfx]

You could also temporarily disconnect the blue switch hook wire from 1, the white handset jack wire from 3, and see what happens

I just did that (with the ringer removed), connected it to the line, and the phone behaves even worse.  Calling out is fine, no issues. If someone calls the line, it causes a line fault. It caused the Comcast EMTA to light up like a Christmas tree and leave an error in the log, knocking out phone service for a minute as some protection circuit in the EMTA waited to reset the line.  Normally this only happens if there is a short someplace, but there was not in this case....

On the Black Trimline, does it still have the original spade lugs on the wall end of the cord?

Nope, someone spliced on a Lucent modular jack in a rather hackish way...no way to revert. Its wired correctly.

[poplar1]

OK, I give up. The AD1 base is just a ringer + capacitor + switch hook. If you completely remove the handset (there is a tab on the handset cord that when pushed down allows the handset cord to be removed), then since you also already removed the ringer, then there's nothing left to short out other than the capacitor, which should not be connected since one side of it went to the ringer. I guess you already tried a different line cord?