3/46 Metal 302 with Three CCC Rings

[Doug Rose]

I picked this up on Craig's List Wednesday night with a 307. Not an easy find and all dated match including the dial plate....Doug

[Doug Rose]

I "think" I remember something about the Concave Cs metal base being made by another company for WE. I have had a few and all seem to be dated 3/46.

CCC and K on the other side. Even the dial plate matches. I think the only replacement was the handset cord. Definitely a cool 302 variant.

This is by far the nicest one I have ever found....Doug

[unbeldi]

As far as I have been able to observe, all new metal-shell 302 made after the war have housings made by a third-party supplier who used the CCC logo.  Stromberg-Carlson also used the same supplier for metal housing for the 1243-type sets. Those have the same logo inside, and I do have a picture of that somewhere.
Why they used metal housings again after introducing plastic is unclear, but my guess is that it was by some customer demand. About the same time even Kellogg made 1000-type sets with metal housings, that were not mentioned in any catalogs or brochures. I believe it Roger Conklin who explained that this was in response to some customer's requirements.

[Jim Stettler]

As far as I have been able to observe, all new metal-shell 302 made after the war have housings made by a third-party supplier who used the CCC logo.  Stromberg-Carlson also used the same supplier for metal housing for the 1243-type sets. Those have the same logo inside, and I do have a picture of that somewhere.
Why they used metal housings again after introducing plastic is unclear, but my guess is that it was by some customer demand.

I suspect it was to "catch-up" the backlog of customer orders. The phone company was already tooled up for plastic, metal became available again so they used a 3rd party vendor to produce housings, If CCC was already producing metal housings for the telephone industry, all they would need was 302 molds. They molds may even of been phone company property that they provided to CCC to produce the housings. It is easy to add a logo to the molds (for QC purposes). 

Just a guess.
Jim S.