Questions about Automatic Electric Model 80 (new at this!)

[classicradios]

I'm new to this hobby and have a few questions about my Seafoam green (turquoise?) AE 80 phone which I hope that somebody can help me with.  Here they are:

1.   When I got this phone, it had the old 4 prong connector.  There were 3 wires attached to it - a red wire to one prong, with a green and yellow wire both attached to another prong.  There was no black wire (the phone is all original).   Question:  Do I need to do anything with the yellow wire or can I simply cut it off? Also, is there an easy way to attach a modern connector to the wires (I'd rather not buy an adaptor even if one is even available).

2.   The phone does not ring (although when I tested it out using "jumper" wires, the clapper did vibrate. ) The unit has a 0.2 mfd cap at 30 cycles (printed on the cap).  Would the addition, say, of a 0.5 mfd cap to the 0.2 mfd cap to raise the capacity to 0.7 mfd help this problem?  I suppose that I could loosen the brass nut on the clapper assembly or readjust the position of the bells, but any advice as to what would be best would help!  I'm used to working on old radios and these phones are new to me!!!

[Phonesrfun]

Welcome to the forum:

The red and green wires are the only wires needed to operate  the phone.  In your phone, one side of the ringer is connected to the yellow wire and the other side is connected to the red.  So, in order to get the ringer across the line, the yellow has to be attached to the green wire.

It is not recommended to cut off the spade connectors to put a modular plug on the end.  First of all, you no longer will be able to attach the yellow wire to the green, but it would make any phone collector go nuts to knowingly cut off those old cords that are getting increasingly harder to come by.  Instead, just get a modular wall connector that you can hook up in "reverse"; connecting the spade tips to the screw-down terminals, and then run a modular cord from its modular connector to the jack in your wall.

If you do replace the line cord with a modular line cord, then you will not use the yellow and black wires at all.  The ringer wire will need to be removed from the yellow terminal inside the phone and permanently connected to the green.  Tape and store the loose black and yellow wires coming from the modular line cord.

Your ringer is a highly frequency selective frequency ringer set at 30 hZ.  These ringers are more mechanically tuned than they are electrically, so by changing the capacitor and/or the clapper setting, you might get a little more movement out of it, but don't hold your breath.  These ringers were used in party line situations when they used different frequencies on the same line for different parties.  These had to be highly frequency selective so that when they sent 30 hz down the line for party A, only party A would ring.

These days, with party lines a thing of the past, most ringing is done at 20 hZ and frequency ringers generally will not work.  30 is close enough to 20 that perhaps with a little tweaking, you might get something, but you will never achieve full ringing.  If it were a 50 hz ringer or a 60 or 66.66 hz ringer, then you could absolutely forget about it.

Hope this helps.

[classicradios]

Thanks for the helpful advice.  I will keep working on the phone and hopefully get it finished up soon!