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Good Price Range for a Bakelite 302?

Started by RDR89, September 27, 2014, 06:17:26 PM

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tallguy58

QuoteDoug, you know those Canadians are always behind the times!


Hey, at least up here we recognised a quality instrument and kept using it.

Cheers........Bill

RDR89

Ok I have the base off now I need to remove the dial.

WEBellSystemChristian

Quote from: tallguy58 on October 02, 2014, 08:23:47 PM
QuoteDoug, you know those Canadians are always behind the times!


Hey, at least up here we recognised a quality instrument and kept using it.


...but us US guys created an even higher quality item (the 500), and started using it! ;)
Christian Petterson

"Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right" -Henry Ford

Phonegal

Hi. I recently acquired a WE 302 ('hotel' version, no dial- is that what they're correctly called?) It has a prewar steel body. I was surprised to find that the transmitter in the handset was dated 11-43 as I had thought that production of this part had been halted due to the war. Exactly what was/wasn't produced for home/commercial consumption during the war? Also: my phone is obviously paint over metal but how can you tell the difference between Thermoplastic and these apparently rare Bakelite units? Is it about weight & thickness? I paid $17 for this phone and got a whole lot of extra dead bug parts for free :) .

Phonesrfun

#19
One with no dial is called a manual set, and one with a dial is called automatic, or just plain "dial" set.  A manual set was used with a manual switchboard, and in the mid-1940's there were still many towns that had manual boards rather than automatic dial exchanges.  There is no way to tell whether your phone was used in a hotel or not unless it has a number card that somehow ties it specifically to a hotel.  Hotels did typically have manual sets because the front desk of any given motel of that time period had a manual PBX which required the front desk clerk to connect any calls.  It could have also been used in a business that had a manual PBX too.

The more likely scenario is that it is a phone from a residence in a town that did not have automatic dial service.  No way to tell for sure.  Some ebay sellers seem to think that because it has a dial blank that phones must have come from a hotel or motel.

-Bill G

Phonegal

Thank you for the tutorial, Bill. As it happens, the phone was indeed from a hotel with a specific room. Thanks again!

Phonesrfun

To answer some of the other questions, there was never a Bakelite 302 made.  They were metal beginning in 1938 when they were introduced, and then later a plastic called Tenite which started during the war to preserve metal.  They did make phones and parts during the war, but on a reduced basis. 


And, by the way, welcome to the forum!
-Bill G

Doug Rose

#22
Super Rare Bakelite WE 302 mentioned earlier in this thread. Metal 302s first appeared in late 1936......Doug

http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=10335.msg109754#msg109754
Kidphone

unbeldi

#23
The move to plastic housings from metal had nothing to do with the war. This was already a general trend in the industry, as for example, Automatic Electric already made brightly colored Tenite telephones in the 1930s.  The reason was to produce colored telephones that had a finish that did not show the wear as quickly as paint did.  Examples of colored plastic phones from Western Electric appeared in 1940 already, more than a year before the Pearl Harbor incident.

The effect that the war did finally have, however, on WECo telephone production was that they essentially stopped making any telephones for the public market in 1942.

Bakelite is a plastic that WECo only used in production telephones for electrical components and handsets. The few examples of housings that have been found were development sets.

Phonegal

Yup, unbeldi & thanks for responding (and Doug R. too). I guess the continuing use of Bakelite for the handsets (well into the 1950's) explains the weight difference over the later handsets (WE 500's and thereafter). Clearly a denser & heavier material and most likely more expensive to manufacture and ship; not unlike the auto industry's cutting the gauge of sheet steel by two thirds from the 1950's to the 1990's. The genius there was making the SOUND of a closing door seem to the same. Tin foil anyone?

unbeldi

#25
Indeed, manufacture of Bakelite F1 handsets, at least in volume, stopped sometime in the mid-50s with the termination of most of the 300-series telephones.  However, the black 500-sets continued to use Bakelite handsets until about 1964, while the colored 500-sets had already been equipped with thermoplastic handsets starting in 1953, and the technology clearly existed.

By my readings, we have no direct information why this decision was made to continue with the Bakelite G1 handsets for the black 500 sets. Certainly they could have made black Tenite or ABS handsets earlier, and they in fact did so starting in 1962, for the black Princess telephones (issued 1963), and a portion of 500 sets.  My guess is that the molding presses and processing equipment for the Bakelite handsets were designed for a much longer than 5-year lifetime and had not reached the depreciation time frames when the colored sets were introduced.  Terminating Bakelite handset production probably would have been cost-prohibitive, despite the savings in terms of shipping weight of sets. Perhaps the phenol resin raw material was still much cheaper also than thermoplastic pellets.