Since I am in the writing mood tonight and have been thinking about how important it is to get this info on the internet where it will last forever here is another interesting payphone find.
I have only seen two of these,and as many things that exist in the payphone collecting area you can find no information on many things in the BSPs. That is because the BSPs were updated and the old ones destroyed or the documents that had to do with the internal working of the Public Telephone Office were treated as classified documents inside the Bell System a example of those documents is what I posted on 29A locks.
As with a lot of things the Bell System reused everything,they also had to figure out how to transition there phones on more then one occasion from one way of doing things to another. so when they made the change from the older door that the 12B fit to the newer door that the 14 and 30 type locks fit they needed a way for the old locks to fit the new doors. I also suspect that they were behind in producing the new locks. So during the transition period they used these adapters to reuse the old locks. so they cut the ears off the old locks and installed the adapters. As the coin collector went around with the new locks he removed the adapters and the old lock and installed the new locks 14A's. It has always been interesting to me that the last lock that fit the old doors were the 15 A and 15 B but they ended up using the 14 on the new doors. 15 nlocks are very rare because few were produced as a result of the new doors.
very interesting! thanks for the info! i've really only been into 30 style locks since my phone is a 1D2 ... but im going to have to check out these other series locks too (i have a 29S and a couple 10L).
but my question is how did they handle the transition from the 29A/30C to "high security locks" like Medeco/Abloy/Desmo, etc..
i would that that would be a more significant change in procedure than in hardware because the format was the same.
thanks for posting all this interesting info! i really appreciate it.
By the time you got to the Medco and Abloy stuff the PTO was no longer following a lot of the processes that they had followed for years they decided to use electronic locks that were married to a electric key and software that managed the collecting of the telephone route. For years the collecting routes were predicted based on money in a collected box. With the advent of smart sets versus dumb sets all of this changed. To keep this short because I could write a book on this subject also the electronic locks were a complete failure and in the end they switched back to mechanical locks. Since in many cases they had junked them they had to switch back to mechanical locks. Also at this point they were having some trouble with folks who could pic the locks. Even the early Medecos were pick-able. Jim