WECo 1E1 Postpay Rotary Payphone (Mostly)

[novarlynx]

So here's my find!

A little while ago a friend of mine found a WECo 1E1 Payphone somewhere and offered it to me, so I got it from him.

Unfortunately I discovered it got vandalized - somebody had managed to break in to the coin vault and steal the money out of the phone. The damage is not horrible though. With some work I could repair the hole in the housing and make it look close to good as new. However the vault door is totally wrecked and will have to be replaced. One of the photos I am attaching to this topic will show how damaged it is.

Anyhow, I got the thing home and of course the upper housing was locked -- so I proceeded to drill it out. Read about the method of using a hammer drill to rattle the lock, so I tried that and got lucky -- the screws holding in the lock fell out, the lock fell in, and it was basically unlocked. Made my own version of the "T" tool by taking a Dremel to the head of a bolt, and then I was in the upper housing. First thing i noticed is some sort of ugly black "soot" on everything, which smelled AWFUL. So I then decided to clean every component inside the phone and re-assembled it. It works, I can make calls with it, but I am not sure of a few things about how these work - I made a post about that in the payphone section.

So, here are some pictures of the phone. The coin return door is missing because the metal around it was bent from the burglary, and I have not had a chance to straighten it out so I can get the coin return door back in. It was quite a fight to get it out with the bent metal. The return door itself is bent a bit too, going to fix that as well.

In the second picture you can see the damage to the housing. I put metallic duct tape over the existing vault door to try to "pretty" it up until I can find a new one. You can see on the front of it though where the burglar put a huge hole in it.

The last picture shows the dial after I cleaned it up and oiled the gears. It would wind up but then it would get stuck. Now it works perfectly fine. I'd like to find a new finger wheel for it eventually though.