Restoration protocol

[mrbugsir]

So I nabbed this AE40 from eBay a few weeks back for under twenty bucks, and want to make it my restoration victim. It will be my first attempt but with the mountains, and I mean mountains, of good info on this forum it should be a piece of cake.

One of the things I want to do it disassemble all the electronics and clean the cloth-covered wires with some warm water and Woolite. But I look inside the thing and wonder what the hell they were thinking when they manufactured it. There are these monumentous globs of solder attaching the fork connectors to the end of the wire. Obviously solderless crimped connectors existed back then, I see them on the line cord connected to L1/L2/G block.



So my first of many questions is about restoration protocol. Should I keep the guts as original as possible, terrible soldering and all to retain the unit's "flavor", or is it better to desolder those things and crimp on a connector? Maybe a subjective question, but I am looking for opinions.

[Matilo Telephones]

A very good question, mrbugsir. I guess the answer depends on your taste and perhaps abilities.

Personally I do not like to make it more beautifull or better that the factory ever did. So, if there were globs of solder originally, I would personally leave them in place.

I do keep the guts as original as possible. I even go so far as replacing missing screws with the exact same model, reusing original spades, etc etc.

But others have a different style of restoring.

Besides that, are you sure theses wires with crimped on spades are original? The colored wires in the picture are made of plastic or rubber. The others are clothcovered. On the phones I usually work on, that would mean they are from different periods.

[HarrySmith]

How far to go on a resto is always a personal decision. Some will not do anything but clean, even leaving old paint with "patina". Others like Mcmurdosilver on eBay turn a phone onto a work of art, so highly polished you would be afraid to touch it and leave a fingerprint. I agree with Matilo, the handset cord is likely a replacement since the phone has cloth insulation and the cord has plastic. One of our AE experts can chime in here about the originality of the cord.

[Matilo Telephones]

Looking at these blobs of solder, I wonder. I have never seen these before. Telephones here have always crimped on spades or, older telephones have nicely woven eyes, made of the threads of the wire.

But these blobs do not look accidental to me and not like sloppy work, at least nog all of them. They may serve the purpose of preventing the cloth from fraying.

I might be wrong, as a base this solely on this picture.

[HarrySmith]

I have noticed the european phones tend to have more elaborate finishing on the wiring. I was impressed by the first EB phone I opened. The thread wrapped ends and the wiring itelf wrapped into an eyelet was neat looking. I have seen those "blobs" of solder on WE phones a lot. You may be right Matilo since it covers the end of the cloth cord it may be to stop unravelling, I never thought of it that way.

[rdelius]

The type 40 set was made from the late 1930s untill the 1970s (US Navy type A?).The handset cords went from cloth to neophreme (rubber) to plastic.Later sets had plastic wiring .Postwar sets most likely had neophreme cords and cloth wires inside.

[poplar1]

Western Electric used similar soldered spade tips on all wires--except the handset and line cords--in 302s from 1937-early 1939. A friend said he prefers this type because they are reusable.

[Bill]

Those solder blobs were absolutely not done by WE. They were done by someone who doesn't know how to solder. I say this for two reasons. First, there is way too much solder on the joint - a proper solder joint never has a blob. And second, the solder blob has occurred because the lug was not hot enough to melt the solder. Rather, the solder was melted by the soldering iron, and kind of dripped onto the lug. In any soldering job, it is critical that the workpiece - in this case the lug - is hot enough to melt the solder on its own. The function of the soldering iron is to heat the lug, not to melt the solder. In this case, since the lug was not hot, the solder has not bonded to the lug - you can probably chip it off with a sharp tool.

In the picture, take a look at the middle screw in the group of three. There are two lugs on this screw. One drops down toward the bottom of the picture. Look at the solder on the tail of this lug. First, there is no excess solder, no big blob. And second, the edges of the solder area have spread out on the tail of the lug. This spreading is an indication that the lug was hot enough to melt the solder and make it flow. This is in contrast to the big blobs of solder on the other lugs, where the edges of the blob have shrunk back under the blob because the lug was not hot enough to make it flow.

If this phone were mine to restore, I would pull those connections out of the phone, melt the blobs and shake off the excess solder, and reconnect them properly. Leaving them as is does NOT constitute restoration.

Bill

[JorgeAmely]

I have a couple of old AE phones (34, 40) that have those solder blobs on the spade connectors. I would keep them, since they don't hurt performance and good or not, that's the way they came from the factory.

[Matilo Telephones]

So, do I understand this correctly? The blobby soldering is a bad job and not done for a specific purpose and it was done in the factory?

Then I would do the same as Jorge. I wouldn´t make the Phone better than it was. As long as it doesn´t inhibit it serviceability, of course.

In case of repairs I would even try to solder the same blobby connections, so all the connections look the same and the reparation will not stand out.

Otherwise there is no end to what you have to do. Repaint in case of paintjobs that are not to modern standards? Replate nickel to a higher finish?

Restoration, in my view, means bringing it back into a former state, whatever that was. It also means that it has to pass the old standards not the new. Apparantly these connections passes AE-quality control. The conformed to their standards back then and I think to the customers standard.

Otherwise you´d be upgrading, pimping or enhancing the telephone passed its Original state.

[unbeldi]

Otherwise you´d be upgrading, pimping or enhancing the telephone passed its Original state.

I have to agree with Matilo's standards.  There is no question that today we can manufacture almost everything better than decades ago, unless we stopped manufacturing what they manufactured, but even then the potential is there. Everything about materials and processes potentially produces better quality today, unless of course it is not meant to last long.
So powder-coating old telephones, for example, seems somewhat absurd to me and high-gloss polishing was hardly performed in any factory. Often we see old finishes simply painted over and that paint comes off now. Why not just do the same to preserve the historical fact?
There is no point in proving that today we can do things better than in old times.

[unbeldi]

As to the solder joints, well they don't look very good indeed, and I would suspect them to be 'cold' solder joints. But even so, it is sometimes amazing how long those can actually function and I have seen them too in original equipment. That the blob would somehow protect the insulation, I find dubious at best. Insulation or non-metal materials don't really connect with the solder much, and textiles would most like be damaged in the fibers by the heat.

[Contempra]

I have a couple of old AE phones (34, 40) that have those solder blobs on the spade connectors. I would keep them, since they don't hurt performance and good or not, that's the way they came from the factory.

I agree Jorge.. keeping them soldered, do not make them less good. And like you said, that's the way they came from the factory !...it's just my own opinion.

[mrbugsir]

Thank you for the feedback everyone.

Besides that, are you sure theses wires with crimped on spades are original? The colored wires in the picture are made of plastic or rubber. The others are clothcovered.

I am not sure if the line and handset wires are original, I am very new to this. But they are definitely old. Both the handset and line cords are straight and black. The line cord has 3 wires wrapped in a vinyl sheath, the wires are stranded and wrapped with some fluffy white material underneath their coverings which is just about impossible to remove without thrashing the delicate stranded wires. When I got it, it didn't have a connector on the end. It looks like a little bit of the insulation was removed not at the end of the wire and screwed into terminals. It also has an arrestor clip crimped to the end when presumably was screwed into the 4th terminal to make it difficult to pull out of the wall.



I tried to put an RJ11 connector on the end but that wasn't happening (anyone have any suggestions?). I ended up punching the mostly stripped wires into an RJ11 Keystone Jack, inspired by another thread in this forum. You guys are geniuses, I'd never have thought of that.

[jsowers]

Since we're discussing restoration, spade lugs are what should be done to the end of that mounting cord. They should be crimped on. There are many threads on crimpers and crimping on this Forum if you need to know the specifics.

You can then connect the spade lugs to a modular jack. That may be what you call a keystone jack. It's the standard wall mount RJ11 wiring box and you can then attach a standard modular mounting cord and use the phone. It can easily be removed if you want the phone to look original. I wouldn't put these boxes on phones to display--only if they'll be used.

The metal piece on the end of the mounting cord is a strain relief. AE mounting terminal boxes (or whatever the name is) had a post in the middle for securing that metal restraint. In the house where I grew up, our circa 1953 box was black Bakelite with a Bakelite cover that screwed on. It was rectangular with cut corners. Normally they were mounted on the wall, but ours was stuffed into a box in the wall and covered with a metal cover plate with a hole for the cord.

I attached a small picture of the mounting box, below.