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Would crank phones still works on today's lines?

Started by mienaichizu, June 21, 2009, 09:00:31 AM

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mienaichizu

Would crank phones still works in todays telephone lines or is it only effective in receiving calls only?

How does this crank phones operates?

Dan/Panther

We did talk about thast once before. The Crank breaks just like a dial does, if you could time the crank by hand, ( which would be very difficult ) I imagine you could get it to dial like a rotary phone.
Don't get me going, I don't have the time to spend hours, turning that crank.... ::)
D/P

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson

foots

I've hear that its also possible to hook up a touch tone kepad to a non dial phone, though I'm still looking into that.
"Ain't Worryin' 'Bout Nothin"

mienaichizu

As I have said in my other post, there is a crank phone that I want to buy at a hundred dollars. I was wondering, if I buy it, can I use it for receiving calls? I believe it is hard to dial in that kind of phone

benhutcherson

You need to disconnect the magneto(the part the crank attaches to) and wire a capacitor in series with the bells in order to get it to ring and not show "off hook."

You'd also need to do some rewiring and probably reconfigure the hook switch. Off hand, I'm not totally sure what all you'd need to do.

Bill

#5
The magneto is a useless part, and since it generates a relatively high voltage when cranked, it must be disconnected as Ben said.

Now you have a ringer box (or a phone) with a disconnected magneto plus a bunch of other circuitry. The next question seems to be whether the "other circuitry" was originally set up for local battery or central battery power. You can tell this from the model of the phone or the ringer box. As D/P pointed out, we had a long thread a while back about converting a local-battery subset to central battery (i.e., modern day) use, and concluded that it wasn't practical without some pretty elaborate component and wiring changes. However, as part of that thread, someone pointed out some external fixes involving a relay and flashlight battery that will do the job.

Search for "local battery" to find this thread.

Bill