Questions about original single-slot payphone handsets

[MaximRecoil]

I disagree. "Dash 52" (oxford gray) handsets with armored cords should be available --- somewhere. Some 234G or 236G multi-slot coin collectors (payphones) with --52 handsets have appeared on eBay.

Yeah, I've seen original gray payphone handsets on eBay before; NOS ones even. I've always avoided them because I don't like the idea of the caps being cemented on, plus every one I've seen has a shorter cord than I want, and with the cemented on caps, you're stuck with the cord it came with.

An oxford gray handset with a defective transmitter or receiver could possibly be sawed open on one end and reglued -- not perfect, but possibly acceptable.

Even if that could be done and be barely noticeable, it would still bug me, so that's not an option for me. Also, I don't know of a way to make it barely noticeable, because a saw blade has a certain amount of thickness so there's a kerf when you cut anything, so you end up with missing material (in the form of plastic sawdust on the floor), so the two pieces can never mate back up perfectly, unlike when something cracks or breaks cleanly off.

Someone on this forum said they've gotten the caps off by using a heat gun and a strap wrench, but I didn't have any luck trying that on an aftermarket payphone handset. I'd also be afraid of melting the handset/cap plastic before the cement got soft enough to budge.

I will look around Sonny's warehouse for a slate blue (dash 293) handset. I seem to recall that we purchased some extra slate blue, black, and bright red handsets back in the 1990s. These have the AT&T unused plastics along with used but tested T1 transmitter units and U3 receiver units.

That would be great if you could find them. I think the Slate Blue color looks better than Oxford Gray, and that AT&T payphone handset I posted in my first post is an exact color match to the Slate Blue Princess that you posted a picture of. If you open both pictures in a graphics program you can find exactly matching RGB values on them, and there's no way that handset started out as Oxford Gray. An Oxford Gray handset could fade and/or yellow over time due to various things such as UV light exposure, but it would never get a bluish tint added to it.

[MaximRecoil]

This is the first appearance of a single-slot WE payphone on the TV show Bewitched. It originally aired on November 9, 1967 (season 4, episode 10). The handset looks like Oxford Gray and it has no blue grommet, which means it didn't have a hearing aid compatible receiver, is that right? Does anyone know what type of receiver it had?

[Kellogg Kitt]

. . . wasted yours and everyone else's time and bandwidth with my useless trivia

Not a waste and not useless.  Much appreciated.  I enjoy the trivia!