Flea Market Find

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Picked up these phones today in Kingston Ontario at the Flea Market behind the City Hall. The Black 500 is a 1977 with a confidencer mouth piece. The Red 2500 is a 1979 with all matching numbers. Paid $30.00 for the pair. They could use a good cleaning.

[AL_as_needed]

Is the confidencer mouth piece for those hush-hush conversation? Im sure that phone has a few interesting stories... Nice finds!

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I have 3 more of these Confidencer mouth pieces. 2 are new in the box.

http://www.roanwell.com/?page_id=523

[jsowers]

I've seen confidencer mouthpieces used when there are banks of phones, like with a telethon. They supposedly diminish background noise. I've never used one to know if they work well.

It's interesting to see these two late 70s NE phones. They show NE was later to use modular handset cords than WE. These two have the traditional hard-wired handset cords of the pre-modular years.

[tallguy58]

I've never seen a NE 500 set with a modular cord. Probably not looking hard enough. Even 80's sets are hardwired.

[andre_janew]

Here in the United States, Western Electric had modular sets starting in the late 1970's.  I have yet to see a hardwired Western Electric set from the 1980's.   

[Jim Stettler]

A lot of phones were 1/4 mod. This means the cords are  hard-wire  with a mod plug for the wall.

JMO<
Jim S.

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Had a chance to clean up the Black NE 500 and the Red NE 2500 this weekend. Gave them a quick buffing and I changed out the handset cord on the black one. I took the long one off and replaced it with a standard one. I also replaced the line cords with shorter ones. Good to go now!