New Flea Market Find WE 236G-60 Beige payphone

[Doug Rose]

Janet was at it again this morning and came up with a real nice WE 236G-60 payphone. I hooked DT to the top two open screws, got DT but could not break it. What am I doing wrong....Doug

[Phonesrfun]

Check to see if the coin relay has terminals "1" and "2".  If so, these are dial shunt springs designed to thwart the use of a payphone without a coin being in the coin hopper.  If it has such terminals, disconnect them and tape the ends of the wires.  Try that as a first step.

[KeithB]

Wow Doug! Your wife got you a beige beauty!! And it still has its coin relay, too.

[Doug Rose]

Keith...it will be on eBay next week. I am out of room.....Doug

[LarryInMichigan]

I am out of room.....Doug

I could help by taking some of those space-hogging phones out of your way

[Doug Rose]

Larry...I only had a head start, the way you are going you'll catch me in no time!.....thanks.....Doug

[KeithB]

Keith...it will be on eBay next week......Doug

   

[KeithB]

Perchance, would someone happen to know the proper name for Western Electric's "beige" color paint used on these? 

[bingster]

-60 is listed in the WE color charts as "light beige."

[KeithB]

-60 is listed in the WE color charts as "light beige."

A-ha! So that's why it's a 236G-60.  I looked at the color chart on the Porticus web site today, and completely missed the connection.

Thanks, Bingster!!

[KeithB]

Just in case no one figured it out yet...

I purchased this beautiful 1966 WE236G three-slot payphone from Doug and Janet last week.  It arrived Thursday evening, and I was pleasantly surprised to find in addition to the ringer installed atop the backboard, there was also a 4010B "Princess" network installed behind the coin mechanism.  Both of these parts are original to the phone, removing any need for a separate subset.   I spent a few hours taking pictures and hand-writing documentation for all the wires and connections.  The 6M dial was slightly dragging and noisy.  I removed the finger wheel and cleaned the dial porcelain, but haven't begun disassembling, cleaning, and re-oiling the dial gears, yet.  The handset will require label removal and general clean-up and polishing.

On Wednesday I selected several likely candidates for beige paint from Lowe's Valspar color chips, but none came close to matching Western Electric's particular -60 shade of light beige.  Today at lunch I took the upper body to Lowe's to let their color scanner measure the correct beige from the original item, but it didn't perform well.   It saw the paint as much darker brown than it actually appeared.  The paint people said their LCD monitor wasn't always color-accurate   and often showed colors different from the final actual paint color.   In this case, their monitor displayed exactly what resulted when the pigments were blended into the oil-based paint, something too dark brown.   We compared the upper body to many, many different color chips and I finally picked the one I liked most.  If it wasn't going to be 100% accurate, at least I wanted it to be reasonably correct and visually pleasing.  After they mixed the color and dabbed a spot onto the phone for comparison, it looked great wet.  As it slowly dried, it was clearly a very close match.    The smallest quantity they custom-tint was a quart, and I had them fill three spray cans with this oil-based paint. 

The tinted quart of oil-based (alkyd) paint was $11 and each filled spray can was another $8.  The Valspar color number and name are <2004-8A, Vienna Beige>.  Because this phone is in so much better shape than my previous 1962 black 233G, thankfully it won't require stripping and sanding to bare metal.  Instead I'm going to lightly sand the parts with 600 grit sandpaper, touch up any trouble spots, then prime and re-paint. 

So, yeah . . . here we go again!! 

[Phonesrfun]

You may just turn into a pay-phone expert.

Have a good time with it!

[KeithB]

I think <Ron Knappen>  has that title pretty much sewn-up, along with Paul Vaverchak, Stan Schreier, and Bob Bartlett.  I'll never call myself an expert at these pieces of history, but I'll definitely take a small amount of pride in keeping them looking new.  I think the worst thing about getting the beige WE236G payphone to keep my black WE233G company is that I'll still need to find an olive/green one sometime in the future to complete the set. 

[Jim Stettler]

Keith,
Do you have 1 of Stan's  coin-line simulators?  I discovered that they are a pretty good diagnostic tools as well.

Stan's ad is well woth reading and saving for the info he provides. He also has a lot of videos demonstrating his device.

ebay # 300474272668

Jim

[KeithB]

No, I don't (yet.)  I've been studying Stan Schreier's articles at the ATCA website, and I didn't care for <the one that required butchering a coin relay.>  Otherwise, between all of his articles at ATCA and <Doug Alderdice's> and <a few others> I may build my own soon.  I've found a design for a simple <130 VDC power supply> to drive the coin relay, so I'll have to dig out the breadboard soon. 

Thanks for the tip, Jim   He certainly includes plenty of information, including photographs, videos, and even descriptions of everything.