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This Week's Phones - Iskra and VEF

Started by LarryInMichigan, January 23, 2014, 12:10:29 PM

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LarryInMichigan

I received my Iskra ATA 11 from Slovenia and VEF Bagta 50 from Lithuania this week.  Both phones have been cleaned, polished, and reassembled, and both are working. 

The Iskra phone looks to be a copy of a Swiss design.  It is all bakelite, including the finger wheel.  It seems to be fairly well made.  The shell is very thick and is in great condition.  The handset is a bit worn.  Both the transmitter and receiver elements were very weak, so I borrowed a Dutch PTT transmitter from a Dutch phone and a receiver from an Austrian phone.  The receiver element looks like a copy of the one in my Belgian ATEA 'kettle' phone, but the Belgian one does't work very well either.
The front of the shell has a hole near the dial which was probably intended to accommodate a ground start button, but this phone does not have such a button, so there is a brown plastic cap inserted into the hole.  Someone blackened the top of the cap with a black marker or something.  All of the internal components, except for the dial, are mounted to a bakelite chassis which is held to the inside of the shell with two screws.  I did not see any dates on the phone, but based on the construction, I would guess that it was made between the late 1950s and early-mid 1960s.

The VEF Bagta 50 phone is in very good condition, but the quality is quite poor.  The phone has two parts, an upper bakelite housing and a painted metal base.  The bakelite is crude with an uneven surface.  I wonder if it was made with asbestos, and the outlines of the fibers how on the surface.  On the inside of the shell around the dial opening, the bakelite was roughly cut or shaved away in places.  All of the internal components, except for the dial, are mounted to to the metal base.  The metal parts are mostly rough thin steel, and many of the screw holes do not entirely align properly.  The strap which holds the capacitor to the bottom of the base is loose because the screws do not tighten in the holes in the base.  The bottom plate fits very tightly into the base and is held by tabs which snap into slots in the base.  There are no screws holding it.  The phone actually works somewhat well with the transmitter and receiver which came with it, though the frequency response is not very good.  There are no diodes or varistors, so the steel receiver diaphragm make loud popping noises when the hook switch is opened and closed or the dial returns.  I cannot find any dates inside the phone.

Larry

LarryInMichigan

more pictures

Matilo Telephones

Very nice, Larry. Interesting pair of Eastern block telephones.
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

LarryInMichigan

BTW, if anyone has a couple of spare receivers like this, please let me know.

Larry

twocvbloke

I'm sure I saw a receiver similar to that Iskra one on ebay UK a while ago, not sure if it's still there or not though... ???

LarryInMichigan

A number of European phones use receiver elements like this.  The Dutch ones are very similar but smaller.

Larry

Matilo Telephones

Larry, these look like the standard German receiver. What are the dimensions? I think you can buy them NOS at ebay.
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

LarryInMichigan

It's about 4.2 cm in diameter on the bottom and about 1.9 cm in height.

Larry

Matilo Telephones

Thanks. I´ll take some measurements later.
Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

twocvbloke

A bell just rang in my head, the one I saw was from this seller:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/chipmunk_2004

And I think it was Siemens branded (could be quite wrong though), might be worth asking them if they still have it as I'm not seeing it in their feedback... :)

unbeldi

#10
Quote from: Matilo Telephones on January 23, 2014, 02:23:39 PM
Larry, these look like the standard German receiver. What are the dimensions? I think you can buy them NOS at ebay.

Indeed, these are identical to the Siemens receivers that you might find in the W48, for example.

It helps to understand that Siemens was the founder of Iskra in Kranj in 1941, with the intent of producing parts for the German aerospace industry. But despite the order to destroy the factories after the war, some were kept intact and became the foundation for the 'modern' Iskra.  Iskra developed into an industrial giant, much like Siemens in Germany, or Westinghouse and GE in the US.  In the late 40s they started building telephones, initially simply copying or licensing German models, such as the OB-33, and the W48-type.

This ATA 11 was produced starting in 1956. It was Iskra's second line of Bakelite telephones.

Nice find!

Later in the 1980 the company won many industrial design awards around the world for their telephone designs. Some, e.g., the ETA80-series, were copied in the millions around the world well into the 1990s and probably sold more that way than anytime in Yugoslavia.

wds

both of those are really nice looking phones. 
Dave

rdelius

The VEF Bagta-50 had parts that were similar or exact copies of german parts.The 50 in the name is the year of introduction .VEF=State Electro-technical Factory (Riga Latvia).They also made the pre war Minox camera and radios based on Philips designs. Iskra means spark.They also built radio equiptment

Matilo Telephones

Groeten,

Arwin

Check out my telephone website: http://www.matilo.eu/?lang=en

And I am on facebook too: www.facebook.com/matilosvintagetelephones

LarryInMichigan

Quote from: Matilo Telephones on January 23, 2014, 03:55:59 PM
Here is a link to a German seller selling such receivers, but there are more:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/Horkapsel-Antik-altes-Telefon-bzw-Zubehor-W48-W51-W39-V55-/271380265755?pt=Antike_B%C3%BCrotechnik&hash=item3f2f863b1b

Thank you for the link, but this seller wants nearly 8 Euro just for shipping within Germany.  Since many European phones use the same size receiver, I will probably find some eventually.  In the interim, I will borrow the Austrian one I am using now.

Larry