News:

"The phone is a remarkably complex, simple device,
and very rarely ever needs repairs, once you fix them." - Dan/Panther

Main Menu

Help identifying these number plates!

Started by finlover, March 03, 2010, 01:40:54 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dan

Quote from: JorgeAmely on March 05, 2010, 01:54:30 PM
D/P:

I'll scream at the top of my lungs: "Where is D/P?"  ;D ;D ;D


Where is he/???, not only am I aware of a phone he wants, I know the seller personally and can pick it up for him. Send me a PM, Dan/P
"Imagine how weird telephones would look if our ears weren't so close to our mouths." - Steven Wright

GG



If you like, I'll ship you the phone in question (or at least the upper housing only, to save weight), with the fingerwheel off the dial so you can see what I see, and compare to the pictures yourself.  I'll pay for shipping to you, if you'll pay for shipping back to me.  (Or we could bet the price of shipping both ways on the outcome:-)  Send me your postal address via the private message system on this board and I'll ship it within a week. 

There's another Federal on Ebay right now (with a British handset), but it has a different dial.  Similar mechanism but different layout, presumably for areas with old Strowger switches that needed additional time between dialed digits. 

I'm not trying to be an upstart pain in the butt; this is an interesting puzzle looking to be solved. 

rdelius

I checked the Federal set that I posted months ago and the number plate is not like the photo. This is the Federal set with a solid fingerwheel, not the spoked type that was similar to Standard Electric types.
Robby

GG



Robby, check this current Ebay listing: item number is 180632972103 which you can copy & paste into an Ebay search box to get the listing (if I'm not mistaken, if I post the entire URL it will break the column width here and get folks mad at me). 

Click on the photo to enlarge it, then click on the third thumbnail to get a good straight-on front view of the set.  Look carefully at the dial.  Notice the large amount of blank space between the 1 and the 0: enough for four more holes, and the same spacing as you see on British dials. 

I'm willing to bet that your dial is similar to that one.  Mine is different: less space between the 0 and 1. 

These dials apparently used similar mechanisms but differed in the way I've described.  And the only reason I can see for the difference, is that some switching systems needed the extra time between digits that would be caused by the dial with more space between 1 and 0 (that would be an extra 100 milliseconds: not insignificant) that's shown in this Ebay listing.  So Federal produced both types of dials, for the different markets they served.  Federal also produced two types of handsets, one being a close copy of an F1, the other (and more rare) being different in that the roughly spherical shapes on the ends of the F1 were instead more conical as on an AE 43 handset but coming to sharper points at the tops rather than flattened per AE.

Also notice that the phone shown, has a Siemens handset on it, with a microphone cover of a type that I've seen on some British Ericsson phones from Canada.  So that one is what I'd consider a Frankenphone in the sense of having different manufacturers' parts assembled together. 

I need to get off my buttski and take some pics of my Federal set so y'all can see what's going on with that.   Question is, how to upload pics to this site?   Can I do it straight from my HD without having to set up a photo image hosting account somewhere first?   

Dennis Markham

GG, there are couple of nice URL shorteners out there now.  I like either Google's or TinyURL.

Google URL Shortener:  http://goo.gl/

TinyURL:  http://tinyurl.com/

Here is the eBay link you wanted to post:    http://goo.gl/KMLNS

These work very well.  Just cut and paste the lengthy URL into the box, and convert it.  

Thanks for your consideration in the long URL.  There were a few occasions when a lengthy URL caused some problems with a posting.

~Dennis

rdelius

That dial is the other type.If you remove the number card, there are spokes. The porcelain disk on that dial is not like the auction either.
That ericsson telephones limited handset does not look right  on that set. That mouthpeice would have been on a wall telephone.
I have seen other dials on federal sets.
Robby

GG



On mine there are five spokes on the fingerwheel, and there is a protrusion on the back of the fingerwheel under the number card area and right between the holes for digits 3 and 4.  That protrusion meets up with another sticking out from the dial base, and is used as a dial stop (frankly not a good design IMHO since when you take the fingerwheel off, the mechanism continues to unwind under the influence of the return spring). 

The spacing of holes doesn't match Western Electric but is almost a precise match for the fingerwheel on an Elektrisk Bureau ("Oslophone" from Norway) dial, precise as in down to a fraction of a millimeter to my eyes. 

Thanks for the hint about the URL shorteners (heh, "speed dial" for URLs:-).  I'm notoriously bad at remembering URLs unless I copy them to a notes page, and my admin skills are primitive at best, so we'll see. 

Yes the handset doesn't look right on that set (Ericsson & Siemens made the identical handset, both frequently found in Canada).  It really needs an F1, or better yet the odd type I have which is more unique to Federal. 

Now imagine being in the telco in some country in Latin America that used these, and having to keep track of parts that were just a little different, i.e. potentially two types of dials, handsets, etc.  Must have been all kinds of fun for inventory management. 

BTW there was yet another type of Federal set that I've only seen in an ad, that bears a very slight resemblance to a TeleNorm E-type phone where the dial is on a sloping surface at front, and behind it the surface is flat for a while before the handset cradle.  But the cradle sticks up above the flat area in the manner of a 302 though with slightly different curves that are vaguely European.  Never seen one in real life or on Ebay or anywhere else, though I'm sure there must be a bunch hiding out somewhere, if for no other reason than that they were used in our hemisphere.  (Maybe Cuba.  They keep 1950s automobiles in almost-new condition there, so they may have some interesting stashes of phones.  If our gov would get over the silly embargo, someone could go down there and ask around.)

rdelius

I believe the telephone company in Cuba was part of ITT before the revolution.I posted a photo of a WE 102 set that came from Cuba, had a Federal handset. Federal was part of ITT. There was also an early Strowger exchange down there too but I doubt it would have survived.I once saw a 500 set in a photo in Cuba .It might have been Kellogg also part of ITT
Robby

LarryInMichigan

I just posted pictures of my North TP-6-A with an FTR dial (http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=4513).  Here is the picture showing the dial face plate:



Larry

rdelius

That is the same as the Federal dial on my set. You will have fun putting the fingerwheel back
Robby

GG



That one is not the same as the one on my Federal set.  My camera is full of unrelated pics that I'm going to dump into my computer tonight, which will clear the way for taking some photos of the mystery dial in question, and some other stuff I have around here.   

I'll second what Robby said: you'll have fun putting the fingerwheel back on : - ).

If that's one of the versions in which the mainspring had to come off to get the fingerwheel off, wear eye protection when putting it back together again.  Seriously.  Also take careful note of the correct direction for coiling the spring, you don't want to get almost done and find out it's backward. 

I had an Ericsson dial go *boing* on me when I was in high school; they have similar fun & games with the mainspring. 

LarryInMichigan

I already fixed the same type of dial from another TP-6-A.  It is not so bad.  I have had several Ericsson and similar dial springs fly across the room.  The GPO dials have the same type of spring as the Ericsson, but on the underside of the dial.  I had one which was broken at one end, so I had to bend the new end to fit into the covering and rewind it.  That was fun.

Larry