Ringer started working again on its own

[deedubya3800]

I've posted about my 1970 SC 500 whose ringer went silent for several years before working again. It hadn't worked since we lived in this house. I never knew the problem and I didn't have the skills to diagnose it at the time. When I got it out of storage and tried it a few months ago and it was working again, I never considered why it came back to life or what had been wrong with it to start with.

That all changed a few days ago when I took the four-prong plug off the end of the line cord to borrow it for another phone until I can get another one. That's when I noticed that the green and yellow wires were both screwed to the green post. Had I not been on this forum for the past several weeks, I would have had no idea why that was. But I checked the wiring in the phone, and sure enough, the ringer was wired to ground, and someone just ran the ground wire to the green post as a shortcut fix to make it work on newer systems.

That's when it hit me that when we had DSL put in two years ago, the polarity on our line had to be switched because it was reversed. Was it because of this that this ringer, wired the way it is, wouldn't ring for all those years?

[Phonesrfun]

It is not a matter of polarity on the 500 for ringing, but how the ringer is wired on the network inside the phone.  These days, the yellow (Ground) wire is not used at all.  In order to not have to deal with the yellow wire, just make sure that inside the phone, the black ringer wire is connected to L1, where the green wire from the line cord connects, and that the red ringer wire connects to L2 where the red line cord wire connects. 

Most older phones had the black ringer wire connected to G on the network where the yellow wire was connected.  In order to have ringing, one had to tie the green and yellow wires together either inside the phone or at the other end where the phone hooked to the wall or a 4-prong plug.  Simply by putting the black ringer wire onto L1 means that you no longer need to deal with the 3rd yellow wire.

[deedubya3800]

A quick experiment just confirmed that a polarity switch should not affect ringer operation, regardless of how it's wired, as long as the black wire does make it to the opposite post of the red one. But reckon why the ringer didn't work all those years, despite that my multimeter always showed it was getting the proper voltage?

[deedubya3800]

I changed the subject of this thread since I now know it had nothing to do with what I had originally suspected. Maybe I'll get more responses?