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Trying to get my grandpa's and mom's old rotary phones working over Comcast

Started by oliveiracj6, September 17, 2017, 08:48:08 PM

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oliveiracj6

Hello all

I am extremely excited to have found this website and am very hopeful that you can help me get two phones that have a surprising amount of sentimental value working again.  Honestly, I'm worse than having no knowledge because I've read a couple of things and now I'm afraid that I'm in the process of making false assumptions, so please feel free to set me straight.

I really have three different problems going at the moment and I'm not sure if it's better to have them all in one post or separated, so please let me know if I should break these up.  Thank you.

Firstly, my grandparent's old teal ITT Kellogg phone doesn't currently ring.  I don't recall it not working as a child (when I lived with them), so I suspect it may be a wiring issue.  When I run it through the dialgizmo, I can call out and speak on it, but when someone calls it doesn't ring.  I currently have the green and yellow wired to the green of the line and the red to the red.  I've read that it could be that it's not getting enough power to ring, it could be that an issue with party line wiring that needs to be redone, etc.  I have no idea, but the next phone (Western Electric) is ringing, so I suspect it's not a power issue.  Also, I'm wondering if I should get a phone line with more wires in it.

The next phone is my mom's old Western Electric phone that she bought as an antique (for lack of a better term) and had renovated to work in the family deli.  It's a delight to hear that thing ring, to dial out on it, etc.  It works as expected with the dialgizmo, but the voice quality both ways is poor at best.  I don't remember it being like that as a child, but it's been 30 years, so between it sitting in garages and my hearing going bad, it could be anything!  haha.  Seriously, I was hoping for any advice or tweaks I might be able to do to get it a bit clearer.  Also, the plastic screw in holder is damaged and I was wondering if there was the possibility of a replacement part.

My final issue is my house wiring.  I unplugged the plug inside of the phone box, which I thought would get all of my phone lines running together.  I was under the assumption that I needed to run a line from my comcast box into one of my outlets and the rest of the outlets would work.  My office phone jack doesn't seem to be working.  I noticed that the yellow and black wires aren't connected anymore and only the green and red wires still are.  From what little I understand, it seems that the green and red wires are the most important, but I'm hoping that you might be able to see something obvious that needs to be fixed.  Is there a simple way to see if a jack is working?

Thank you for reading this and I look forward to learning a lot about these awesome phones.  I have some pictures that I'd like to include, but I'm not sure if they're too big.  I can't seem to get them to show.

Best wishes
Chris

jsowers

Chris, welcome to the Forum! I think you've come to the right place for the problems you mention. But first we need some pictures because it's just stabbing in the dark without them.

Do you have a PC? If so, open Paint (Start-All Programs-Accessories-Paint) and drag a picture into the white space and open it. Then click Resize and change the setting to something like 75 or 50 to make the picture a bit smaller. Then re-save it and it should post OK.

If you have a Mac, then maybe someone else here can help with iPhoto. Let us know.

Your teal Kellogg phone sounds like a really nice one if it's the color I'm thinking of. We need to see a picture of the ringer and the network beside it to show how it's connected, so you'll need to open it up. Just two screws on the bottom. It sounds like you may have a party line ringer, but we'll see.

You're so lucky to have phones from your parents and grandparents. Many of us wish we had them, but we only have the memories of using them and hearing them ring.

About your house wiring, it really only uses red and green. The yellow and black wires were reserved for a second line or if you had a Princess or early Trimline phone, yellow and black were for a transformer to power the dial light. In normal phone use, you don't need yellow and black.

So please post some pictures and we can hopefully get things straightened out.
Jonathan

.....

Hi Chris, Welcome to CRPF. Lots of help here when needed. The best place to be when it comes to phones.


HarrySmith

Hi and Welcpme to the forum. As soon as you get pictures up we will be able to answer your questions.

This page has loads of info about posting pictures if what was suggected earlier does not work for you: http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?board=84.0
Harry Smith
ATCA 4434
TCI

"There is no try,
there is only
do or do not"

dsk

Hi, and welcome to the forum, we'll try to help you as good as we can.

dsk

oliveiracj6

Wow.  Thank you for the replies and helpful suggestions.  What a great group!  I'll try that with the compressed pictures and get them up tonight.

I'm looking forward to turning off the ringers to my current phones and going with a real ringer!  haha.

Thanks again.

dsk

If we start with the ITT Kellogg, wiring of the ringer inside the phone should be visible. The ringer usually had 4 wires:
1 a red one going to the red wire from the line,
2 a gray or slate one going to a terminal marked K,
3 a gray/red one to the terminal marked A,
4 a black one going to the terminal with the green line wire.

If this doesn't help, a picture is needed.

dsk

oliveiracj6

I'm having no luck with the pictures on my computer.  I'm not sure if it matters, but I use Ubuntu (Linux).  I'm going to try this from my work computer tomorrow (normal Microsoft pc).  Thanks again. 

@dsk  I'm not the greatest at wiring, but it looks as you described.  I'll try to get a picture up tomorrow though, just to be sure I'm not wrong.

@jsowers Thank you for the advice on the pics.  They're smaller now, but I'm getting an error instead of it just spinning endlessly.

@all  Thank you!  Honestly, I'm very excited to try to get these things going!  I can't wait to talk into a "real" phone again!  haha.


oliveiracj6

Here's the error I'm getting...

Again, hopefully an ubuntu issue.


An Error Has Occurred!
Your attachment has failed security checks and cannot be uploaded. Please consult the forum administrator.


jsowers

You might want to make the pics about 100 to 300K in size. I do and almost never get that message.

They don't need to be large files for us to see what's going on. If you search on "security error" you will get lots of advice from others who have had the problem. There's a whole thread devoted to it, but there are no 100% fixes for the problem yet. It comes down to a bug in the Forum software. So you are not alone at all in having that error. Here is that thread, FYI.

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=16137.0

You can try, as someone suggested, saving them as a .png file. Also it could just be one picture out of six causing the problem. Sometimes a "save as" and save with a different filename is all it needs.
Jonathan

TelePlay

This is an in the weeds inside baseball analysis of the image uploading problem encountered here which is good for all members to know about uploading images to the forum to avoid the security error.

==========================================

oliveiracj6 sent the 7 images in question to me by way of email, at my request for analysis.

The pictures were taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T6. The camera records the images as 5,184 × 3,456 pixels in size, in jpeg format and at 72 pixel/inch which resulted in an image file of about 495 Kbytes, well below the 3 MByte file size which produces a file size uploading error - not the case here.

The camera records about 61 pages of meta data when taking each image.

I stripped off the meta data using BatchPurified Lite which left 2 pages of meta data. Tried to upload the stripped images but still got the upload error.

I went back to the original image, opened it in MS Paint and reduced the size so the largest side was 2500 (by 1666) pixels, half the size of the original image as sent (1/4 the original size of 5184 by 3465 pixels). The reduced size image WITH all of the meta data uploaded without raising the error message.

7 images were sent, I've uploaded the images in this and the next reply by phone type. The 500 first, the older phone next.

It was interesting to see than an image under 3 MBytes in file size caused the error due to the image size being over 5,000 pixels. It was the >5,000 pixel size that raised the security error. It might be the recoding module could not handle an image of that size due to resource allocation within the SMF software, even though the file was much smaller than the known 3 MByte resource limit.

Bottom line, resize images so that the widest size of the image does not exceed 2,500 pixels and they should upload without error.

TelePlay

The remaining images:

oliveiracj6

Thank you to John for putting those up and taking care of them.  As I mentioned in our email, I guess I forget how gigantic the pictures my fairly new to me camera takes. 

I'm embarrassed how dirty the phones are in the pictures, but I promise there is a reason.  I plan on trying to get them cleaned once I'm done working on them, but I'd like to leave the pencil marks made by dialing with a pencil.  I don't know, I guess they just help me remember my grandpa.  Anyway, I'm going to be pretty careful about what gets cleaned and what doesn't.  I'd love any advice you can offer on that.

It's funny how much phones remind me of people (I guess I'm getting old), but as jsowers mentioned, out of all of my aunts, cousins, and siblings I do feel lucky to have walked away with these.  If I get these running, my next project is my grandpa's Charley Weaver Bartender toy.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rmzxuQQAHM  Does anyone know a good resource for looking into those?

Thanks again, all!

poplar1

On the ITT phone, it appears that you already moved the black ringer wire from G (where the yellow line cord wire was) to L1 (with the green line cord wire). Is it ringing now?
"C'est pas une restauration, c'est une rénovation."--François Martin.

Dan/Panther

Welcome to the forum.
You may want to check out the section on wiring diagrams. We have diagrams for most type phones.

D/P

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson