What dial for a B1 base?

[Bill]

A couple weeks ago, I picked up this nice round-base B1/E1 for $22. I think it will clean up nicely, though there may be rust (as opposed to crud) at the edge of the base that will necessitate a paint job. I would like to retrofit a dial, so my questions are these. Is there any reason NOT to add a dial to a B1? CAN I add a dial to this B1 - some of the photos I have seen look like there is a "turret" on the body that the dial mounts in. Which dial is appropriate? And where would I get this dial?

[Edit - added the third picture. On the left is a four-leaf hookswitch. The switch on the right has only one leaf - in other words, it is not a switch, just a tie point.] The only thing that resembles a date code is the red-ink-stamped "236" (or is it "23G") barely visible at the 3 o'clock position in the last photo. Can this be right?]

Thanks for your knowledge and guidance.

Bill

[Jester]

Bill,

Your deskset will take any of the 3" diameter dials of any make once the dial blank is removed from the housing.  Your phone does not have a recessed mount, so the dial will set on top of the housing as you see on the WE sticks.  Adding a dial makes good sense if you want to use the phone & not just look at it.  Exactly what dial you use and how you add it into the circuit will depend on how the leaves for the switch contact are arranged.  Bill Guerts (Phonesrfun) has helped several with similar problems, and will surely be along shortly with some good advice.  In the meantime, a picture of the inside of your deskset--with the base cover removed & the switch exposed--would be helpful.  BTW, $22.00 is a great buy for a B1 mount with E-1 handset!

[Dennis Markham]

Bill, that WAS a great deal for $22!  The E1 handset appears to have a "bullet" transmitter, indicating it is an older E1.  That single prong plug is also an old one.  I don't know a lot about those plugs but did some something written recently about them.

The B1 I have was a "manual" (non-dial) when I bought it.  I put in a W.E. #4 dial and enjoy that very much.  You see #4 dials on eBay often.  They sell in the $40-75 price range from what I remember.  As you probably know you will need a subscriber set (ringer box) to connect the phone for use on the phone line.

I'm sure others will chime in with comments and suggestions.

[Phonesrfun]

The #4 dial would definitely be the most appropriate....a 4H (H= Handset) and either a metropolitan or a rural dial number plate would be appropriate.  

The older the dial, the more expensive, and the #4 is getting kind of old.  A #5 or a #6 would work, but they will not have the clickety sound of the ratchet inside like the #4.

To get it to work properly, you will need to get a subset which has the induction coil and ringer inside.  the subset mounts on the wall and the cord from the phone is not designed to hook directly into the phone line, but rather into the subset, which hooks to the phone line.

Send some pictures and ask questions.


-Bill Geurts

[Phonesrfun]

Actually, as I was driving home from work, I realized I gave slightly the wrong information.  A #2 dial would have come with the earliest B1 mounts, and yours is probably early, as evidenced by the bullet E1 handset.  The only difference between a #2 and a #4 dial is that the #2 was designed to be mounted on the face of the base, and not recessed as were the dials on a D1 mount.

A #4 would also be appropriate, and a #2H or a #4H would work.  The #2 has the fingerstop mounted on the outside rim of the dial, and the #4 had a recessed fingerstop that facilitated the recessed mounting technique.

A #2 will cost about 1.5 times the cost of a #4 dial.

Sorry for the confusion.

[Dennis Markham]

Bill, what about that single-prong plug.  Wasn't there some discussion recently on one of the club list serves about those plugs?  I can't remember the history and I have never personally run into one of them.  I think they were the predecessor to the 4 prong plug.

[JorgeAmely]

Dennis:

Didn't someone said that this phone could have been used in a restaurant or some other place like that? When a V.I.P. customer received a call, the waiter would bring this type of phone to the table and plug it into a nearby jack. I think it would be possible to have a few jacks in a restaurant all wired to a common subset box.

My 2 cents.

[Phonesrfun]

That plug, being 2 conductor (tip and sleeve) could not have been used in regular telephone service.  Even though the regular phone line is two conductors, the subset effectively splits the signal to two distinctly different levels for each of the transmitter and the receiver.  For this, you need three conductors for a sidetone set, which is the minimum between the phone and the subset.  An antisidetone set needs 4 conductors.

The early pluggable phones that were sidetone used a three conductor plug.  When they came out with antisidetone in the mid/late 30's a phone that was to be plugged into a subset needed a 4 conductor plug, and that is when they introduced the 4-prong plug.

Later, when the guts of the subset were moved into the base of the phone when the 302 came into being, they just kept the 4 prong plug.  Two conductors were used for the two wires of the telephone line (tip and ring), a 3rd was used for a local ground to accomodate party line ringing, the the 4th was largely unused in normal service.

[Phonesrfun]

By the way, when I say that the two conductor plug could not have been used in normal telephone service, does not mean that this arrangement was not actually used in some environment.  It is possible to hook the transmitter and receiver in series and have it plugged into a local intercom or perhaps the phone was used as a test set.  That would only need two wires.  

It obviously had some purpose, but not for regular telephony in a home or business.

[Dennis Markham]

Thanks Bill, for clearing that up for me.

[Dennis Markham]

Bill (and others), to help clear up the difference between the recessed dial of the D1 body and the raised dial of the B1 body I took a couple of photos to illustrate those differences.  The second photo also shows the oval shape of the D1 vs the round shape of the B1.  From what I understand the B1 body was made only a couple of years before the change to the D1 body.  Also I attached a photo taken from a current eBay auction for a #2AB Dial.  That photo illustrates the finger stop on the outside of the dial housing rather than the finger stops that came later, after it had been moved inside.  In fact many #2 dials had the finger stop screw holes welded shut and the designation changed to #4.

Here is the current eBay auction for the #2 dial.

http://tinyurl.com/yf37ayv

As Bill said, it goes for a considerably higher amount.  This one was taken from a 51AL stick.  I have no personal experience with the #2 dial but I believe there is one less contact than the #4 and later dials.  This may have a bearing on how it can be wired---for sidetone vs anti-sidetone service.

[Phonesrfun]

Nice photos, Dennis!

I might add that the 2AB dial was used in candlestick applications.  An extra contact was used for handset telphones, and so the switch assembly was modified for the 2HA and 2HB dials.  Mechanically the dial was the same.  There were other middle letters for other applications, but for normal uses, H would be the one to use for a handset

The last letter designated whether it was a metropolitan dial number plate with numbers and letters ABC, DEF, GHI, JKL, etc.  The rural dial was numbers only.  The suffix A meant that it was a numbers only number plate, and the suffix B meant that it had the numbers and letters.

Electrically there is no difference between the numbers only dial and the metropolitan numbers and letters.

[Phonesrfun]

It looks like about a year ago (before I joined) there was quite an informative discussion about the #2 and the #4 dials, complete with a link to something that is on the ATCA web site.

Here is the discussion from last year:

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=183.msg1447#msg1447

[Dennis Markham]

Bill, (Phonesrfun) I thought I was experiencing Deja Vu as I posted those photos last night.  In fact I was searching for the link to the ATCA page that you refer to in this post.  I lost a lot of my data during a computer melt-down a few months ago and lost that link.  I forgot that I had posted it here before.  There is some good info on that page about the early dials.

[bingster]

Bill, when you get a dial and go to install it, you can check out the diagrams in the "Technical Stuff" forum for instructions on how to wire it.  These diagrams are good for B & D mounts with #4, #5, and #6 dials.  Some #2 dials are missing a terminal, so if you wind up with one of those, we'll have to come up with special instructions for using it.

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=784.0