Trimline Rotary dial cleaning/removal

[rtp129495]

Hello all, well i got me a yellow trimline, ill post pictures later. Anyway i want to clean it up as it was used in a kitchen and Flour among other things was inside the handset. I guess most of its life it was a kitchen phone for a messy homemaker lol. 

So that begs the question, since I broke two inside plastic clips that I had to glue back on disassembing it initially I thought i'd ask before trying to take the dial face apart by guessing. How does the front dial come off it to clean the plastic behind it? i really like this dial on it the smallest ive seen.

Any ideas?

[ESalter]

Those phones are rather complicated to disassemble.  The round dial center has a small hole on one side, stick a paper clip or something in there to carefully snap it out of the dial.  Under it you'll see a 3-legged star looking metal piece, each leg is captivated by 2 little bumps on the fingerwheel.  Rotate that metal piece one way or the other to get it between the sets of bumps then the fingerwheel and fingerstop should pretty much fall off.  If you need to actually remove the entire dial, let me know, I'll take some photos of the inside of one telling you what screws to remove and what to be cautious of.  Good luck! ---Eric

[GG]

Beware removing the finger-stop!  It also restrains the dial return spring!

If you're going to remove the finger-stop, first make a black dot in permanent marker on one of the three plastic legs that mount the fingerwheel (you will never see it when it's reassembled).  Then count the number of times it revolves when it's released (it will revolve slowly at dial speed), because that's the number of revolutions you'll have to re-wind it when you put the dial back together.

The back side of Trimline dials can't be disassembled: they're put together with rivets.  However the dials on AE Styleline phones are assembled with screws and can be taken fully apart for maintenance.  As with conventional-sized dials, in my experience WE is harder to take apart but rarely needs it, and AE is easy to take apart and needs adjustment more often. 

[rtp129495]

I got it done and lubricated it. It works and looks much better, I will post some pictures. The dial wheel was easy to get off once I got the "Western Electric" cover off. The finger stop appeared to not effect the spring. It dials out and works perfect on my landine. it looks nice also.

[ESalter]

Glad you got it taken care of!

[TelePlay]

Resuscitating this old thread to add photos and some comments.

Picked up a 1968 black rotary Trimline a bit ago and decided to take the paint spots off and sell it. but first I tested the dial and noticed it had issues. While it worked fine for the first 7 numbers, it started to slow in the last three as shown in the first image below.

Removed the dial to clean it ultrasonically but to do so I had to remove the paper backing behind the clear plastic number plate. Found out it's easy to remove the spring clip to take the front apart but didn't read the tips above making re-assembly a learning curve thing for me, and then I found this topic.

The dial image below shows the position of the bumps (green circles) on the finger wheel. There 3 sets of two, two between each finger wheel slot (blue box). In normal operation, the star retainer sits between each set of two bumps.

Removal and re-assembly is really easy if you first move the star past the bumps (red arrow), in either direction, to get the star points in the finger wheel slots. At that point, the finger wheel and finger stop are easily lifted out. NOTE where the finger stop sits on the components below, an important thing. Putting it back together is simply replacing the retaining clip with the stars in the finger wheel slots and once installed, rotate the star back between the bumps.

Then, there is a ring that acts as a dial stop and under that ring is a thin round flat metal "spring" like material that must be handled with care. The ring that sits above it when removed will allow the dial spring to unwind. I counted 4 of the 3 plastic stars moving past the stop point. Since my dial was slow in stopping, I put 5 as I turned it when re-winding after cleaning. Wind to five, put a finder on the gear on the other side, place the flat spring on and put the stop retainer on top holding it tight. (the finger stop fits on top of that followed by the finger wheel held my moving the star retainer back into place. It's a bit tricky but if you take photos (which I did not) or good notes (which I did), it goes back together just fine.

Once the moving dial parts are removed, there is a small retainer ring on top of the plastic number plate around the center. It is very thin and it has two small slots in its edge on opposite sides. These slots are used to turn the retainer ring counter clockwise until the small flanges get to the center support slots and the ring is then lifted off. After that, the clear plastic number plate and paper backing card are removed.

The back of the dial has a plastic cover easily removed by taking the cross retention spring off and lifting off the plastic cover.

The dial is now ready for ultrasonic cleaning (I did 25 minutes just one time, rinsed it with water, then rinsed it with distilled water, blew off the water with compressed air, warmed it with a hair dryer and oiled all bearing and friction points.).

The third image below shows the dial analysis after cleaning. All pulses are uniform.

I did an analysis of each pulse of the dial before and after cleaning. The two spread sheets show the results. I picked up about 1 PPS in speed, the pulses are consistent across all 10 numbers and the break/make ratio standard deviation improve considerably.

There was no real dirt noticeable on the dial so I assume it was original oil that either became hard, dried out or mixed with dust (or any combination of the three). There was some crud in the ultrasonic solution but not much compared to some of the dirty dials I have cleaned.

[Jim Stettler]

Here are a 1968 and a 1974 BSP on trimline dials.

Jim S.



http://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/document-repository/doc_details/10417-501-162-102-i2-dec68-10-type-dials-trimline-id-and-maintenance

http://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/document-repository/doc_details/2689-501-162-102-i4-aug74-10-type-dials-id-and-maintenance-tl

[TelePlay]

Thanks,

I figured they were out there somewhere but not having worked in the system, I still am not very good at finding BSP's.

I was just impressed that I opened the phone, ended up with some 30 parts laying on my dungeon bench top, successfully cleaned the dial and got it back together without any extra pieces left on my bench, and it worked.

One thing I did notice was that 1/3 extra wind I put into the dial spring made the black center plastic cover be off by 120 degrees. While working with it, I was impressed how WE made these parts so they only go together one way and in this case, making sure the spring is would correctly.

There was a point at which I said, and not having photos taken along the way, what did I just do!, but it all worked out in the end. And, another example of what ultrasonic cleaning can do for a dial.