Help needed wiring a Northern Telecom 554 (made in Ireland)

[jonboysez]

Hi just acquired this old rotary wall phone which appears to be a Northern Telecom phone made in Ireland type 554 I think. I have looked at Western Electric 554s but the network block is totally different. Anyone got any ideas how to wire this for use in England? There are a couple of internal wires that are not connected also but looking at the wiring diagram they may only need to be connected if none-standard set-up??? (I am a novice at this and reading wiring diagrams I'm learning slowly!) Any help greatly appreciated.

[dsk]

It's not easy to see whats wrong at the picture, but at least, diagram shows slate/yellow should go to screw terminal L2 and slate/green should go to L1
Connecting L1 and L2 to the telephone line should make the speech circuit work in UK as well.
(you could try with a battery of 3-6 V, or a little 9V battery) (The small 9V cant deliver enough to harm the phone)
The ringer are not entirely as in UK and should be rewired if you will use it together with more than one other phone. Else you could connect the red wire to A and the black to L1.

The UK ringer wiring is a little more complex.

dsk

[twocvbloke]

They're easy to get to work on UK lines, I have a few US and Canadian (Northern Telecom) phones and they work fine...

The Black wire and the Slate-Green wire goes to L1, the Slate-Yellow wire (currently on L1) goes to L2...

Pick yourself up one of these:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/300815086080

And for that, you wire it as Red wire to L1, White wire to L2, and insulate or cut off the Green and Blue wires, and you should have yourself a nice working 554...

Slightly pipped to the post there, but still handy though...

[jonboysez]

Ah that looks quite easy - many thanks to you both - I'll give it a try after the jungle has finished on tv.

[twocvbloke]

No probs, they're simple phones to get working anyway, it's just a case of moving the wires about...

As for the UK ringing circuit, there is away to convert the phone to run on it as a 3-wire setup (so with that GPO cable I linked to, you'd use the Red, White and Blue wires, patriotic eh??), but it complicates things and makes unnecessary alterations, especially as most telephones sold here are 2-wire jobbies anyway, so better to stick with it's built-in ringing circuit...

Though if you have any GPO phones on the same line, you may get bell tinkle on them when you dial out from the 554...

[jonboysez]

Yippee that seems to be working - loud dail tone and bells working properly when I phoned from my mobile phone. Just need to make sure it dials out ok and speech ok at a more convenient time (10:40pm here now) and when I've put case back together - that dial looks a bit different with the little pin hole in.

[jonboysez]

Phone is working fine now, thanks for the help guys. I'm not over impressed with the dial mechanism on these, feels a bit cheap and plasticy compared to the UK GPO phones.

[twocvbloke]

Yeah, the dial on a Northern Telecom 500 I have was pretty much junk, it didn't work properly, the fingerwheel is all cracked up and I tried to dismantle it and it just self destructed, they definitely cheapened them compare to the likes of Western Electric's original dials for the 500 series, but then that's manufacturers for you, take a great concept, and make it cheap...