Opened another box this morning and just sighed as I pulled out the phone and set it on my work bench.
The big question, when is a phone just not worth it to restore?
The yellow plastics are greatly discolored from light over the years, the worst I've ever seen, and while it could be brought back to yellow with hours of work, is sit worth it for a 921A22-093 Accent (tall case, wicker in yellow) telephone from June of 1975?
Might be easy to color restore (not a whole lot of plastic area) this phone but since my WE Aqua Blue 500 (which I spent a good 10 hours on plus the cost of restoration materials at about $4) only sold for a $29.00 plus shipping, what's the point in restoring this phone?
So, the question on the work bench is simple, when is a phone past the point of no return, worth it, to restore based on market demand and/or value? Or, to put it another way, if you had the experience (knew how to do it and have done several) to color restore this phone, would you take on this phone regardless of intent (keep it or sell it)?
What do you think I should do?
I don't restore telephones. I buy them and look at them. (then pack them away and buy more)
In my opinion that phone is to much work to restore for re-sell.
However: No matter how discolored , cracked, broken a phone might be, It always has some use as a practice piece for new restoration techniques.
I would save it until you find a new restoration technique to try.
Just my opinion,
Jim S.
hmmmm....
Maybe put it into auction as is, at a start price just to cover purchase price and a couple of dollars extra (plus shipping as normal) as an experiment, to see if it sells and for how much compared with all the work put into the blue phone?
Or offer it as is for a few dollars (to cover purchase price) plus shipping via CRPF classifieds?
If it doesn't sell, is any of it worth more as parts?
And if the above don't work out, restore it as and when (I quite like the new technique idea)?
John - You bring up very good points here. If the resto is fun and/or part of trying out new techniques (and sharing your learnings with us..... ;) ), then spending the time may make great sense. Your blue 500 is an example. Otherwise, I believe you have to put a significant value on your time, and walk away from most of these high-effort/low-dollar-value projects. I've tried to "reform" myself in this area, and let a lot of stuff go without feeling I need to "fix it"..... :D
Viking funeral.
In all seriousness. That phone is not worth the effort to restore. Maybe there are some parts worth saving, maybe it's worth it to try a few techniques with no expectations? But it definitely looks a bit too far gone.
John.... I saw your blue 500 set with an amazing transformation go for under $30. You put many hours of hard work into it.
If you get this up to your standards, what would it sell for? It is not a desirable phone.
I think you knew the anger before you asked the question......sorry....Doug
Quote from: Doug Rose on July 22, 2018, 12:51:52 PM
John.... I saw your blue 500 set with an amazing transformation go for under $30. You put many hours of hard work into it.
If you get this up to your standards, what would it sell for? It is not a desirable phone.
Doug, as you said in this post,
Quote from: Doug Rose on July 20, 2018, 09:45:04 PM
When I read a book, I don't dog ear the pages. I don't spill food or drink on it. It's about respect.
I feel the same way about phones. I just couldn't sell that Aqua 500 on eBay looking green just knowing what was under the thin, top plastic layer. Would have been lucky to get $9.99 if left green. So I did someone a big nice by taking it back to Aqua and of course, lost money on it. I think I paid $25 for the phone. But that was a 500 and someone is now going to have a sharp looking phone on their desk, or for sale in their antique mall booth for $100.
It's a hobby and by definition, a hobby does not make money, an IRS rule (a business that takes a loss each year is seen as a hobby and not entitled to business considerations for tax purposes).
This Accent phone is not a somewhat rare colored 500 but should it get any less treatment and respect being something that has successfully survived some 40 years? Other than discoloration, it's a working phone. Would I get $9.99 on eBay? That's about it if it sold at all. Is it worth the effort? No. Would I even get my original purchase price and restoration costs out of it? No. But if color restored, it would make one person's day, the person who would buy it for a deal.
But, how about putting a green handset on it and selling it in the sports memorabilia section (Green Bay Packers are green and gold)? Football season is approaching.
Right now, it's back in the box while I think about it. Have to do something with it, but what is the question.
~
I think I hear "Taps" playing in the background....
Can you find another WE K handset in yellow?
That's where most of the work lies.
But Yea, I hear taps too.. well it would make a good organ donor.
Taps?
Quote from: FabPhones on July 22, 2018, 04:23:42 PM
Taps?
The common name of a song, a tune, origin of which seems to be European in tune and title (Taps is short for longer titles).
From a military web site and Wikipedia.
"Taps" is mostly an American military tune comprised of only 24 notes that is sounded at the completion of a military funeral ceremony.
"Taps" is a bugle call played at dusk, during flag ceremonies, and at military funerals by the United States Armed Forces. The official military version is played by a single bugle or trumpet.
They played Taps in the sound track of the movie "A Christmas Story" when the father walked out of scene to bury his busted leg lamp in the back yard signifying the final end of the leg lamp, its death,
Keep it and use it for parts, if you are into that style of phone. I keep everything from screws on up. Spare parts for vintage equipment is something you cannot buy at the local hardware store.
John,
you are right when you want to treat even this discolored phone with respekt, it is still a phone and thus part of our hobby. Even if most of us consider it monetary worthless - who knows, maybe to someone out there it does have an emotional or whatever value. But your time is precoius too, we all only do have a limited amount of lifetime. So what about selling this phone as is for restauration and give someone the great experience of bringing it back to original. I would consider this phone a good "starter phone" to improve restoration skills maybe even for a beginner (I would not have dared to learn new techniques with a high valuable phone- if it goes wrong, well, I probably couldn't forgive myself my stupidity). But many of us have experienced the satisfaction when one has himself restored a phone with a nice result. To me way better feeling than just have bought it that way.
Haf
~
I didn't consider the fact that our non-American members wouldn't know the significance of Taps... ;)
Quote from: Pourme on July 22, 2018, 05:03:10 PM
~
I didn't consider the fact that our non-American members wouldn't know the significance of Taps... ;)
...and that this word has a different meaning for at least the German speaking members ;)
Taps, tapsen = to pitter patter your feet or paws
Haf
Quote from: Haf on July 22, 2018, 05:12:34 PM
...and that this word has a different meaning for at least the German speaking members ;)
Taps, tapsen = to pitter patter your feet or paws
Haf,
You are not wrong. That is part of the history, which I left out because the contest of "Taps" that Pourme set up was death and burial, goes to the full origin statement from Wikipedia which supports your experience with "Taps" over there.
"Taps" originates from the Dutch taptoe, meaning "close the (beer) taps (and send the troops back to camp)". An alternative explanation, however, is that it carried over from a term already in use before the American Civil War. Three single, slow drum beats were struck after the sounding of the Tattoo or "Extinguish Lights". This signal was known as the "Drum Taps", "The Taps", or simply as "Taps" in soldier's slang.
As for the replies, I think the challenge flag has been thrown down and I'm always up to a challenge, especially this summer when all of my time can be devoted to phones instead of moderating.
Someone once said if you have no expectations, you will never be disappointed. Well, a disappointment early evening gave me the anger to go after this phone.
Had to fix the ringer (had to take it out and take it apart to do so) but once it was working, all that was left was the color.
The lower right side is after about 15 minutes of work. The discolored burnt orange was so hard, I had to use full strength acetone to cut it off and then went to 70% acetone in denatured alcohol to "smooth" out the pure acetone surface. 400 grit wet sandpaper to remove the haze, then 600 and 800. Will do the left side before going to higher grits. Stopped an half a side to show the difference. It's a very nice yellow under that burnt orange. Shouldn't take more than an hour or hour and a half to do all the plastics (the top and handset).
I'm doing this with the expectation that I will sell this phone for more than $100 plus shipping.
I can't wait to see how the handset comes up.
Waaaay off my colour scheme but I'd enjoy doing that one, the basket effect on the side will be interesting to work on.
:)
Progressing on this phone, I finished the top and it turned out nice. Still only at 600 grit dull, sanding up and polishing will come later.
I discovered a helper to removing discolored plastic with pure acetone (highly discolored plastic). After wetting my cotton ball backed high bite cloth swab, I dab it onto a small pile of baking soda I have placed on the corner of my work area and immediately go to the plastic. The undissolved baking soda picked up by the solvent wet swab adds a bit of bite to the acetone and seems to even out the rubbing in that once the discolored plastic is removed with the acetone swab and soda, the surface is not as rough, doesn't show the cloth marks, as when I just used acetone on the cloth. This greatly reduces sanding.
After removing the discolored plastic, I go to a new cotton ball backed high bite cloth swab and wet it with my 10-10-80% acetone/MEK/denatured alcohol solution and dab that into the baking soda. This goes a long way to removing the white haze and ends up with a surface that is similar to 800 grit wet sandpaper but without the 800 grit marks. This adding soda to the 10-10-80 mixture between grits as I work up to 2000 may speed up the process and result in a better final shine. Stay tuned for that.
The wicker slides easily off of the base. The wicker is actual on a plastic backing which slides off of the phone base.
The other image below shows the front and back of the base without the wicker. It is interesting that the front behind the plastic backer wicker is a bit darker than the back of the phone. It may be a bit hard to see in the images but the front undeer the wicker is a bit darker than the back under the wicker indicating that long term UV radiation actually made it through the wicker to darken the front behind the wicker.
The ring at the base on the front side of the phone is burnt orange while the back ring is very close to the original yellow color. Next step is to get the ring back to yellow.
A very remarkable result so far, very nice. And your improvemengt with the baking soda sounds promising. So restoring even this phone has still brought you to some new conclusions and techniques. Good to hear and thanks for sharing!
Haf
Agreed, and I must say I'm glad you chose to restore it.
One less phone for the dumpster.
Quote from: Jim S. on July 22, 2018, 10:46:27 AM
I don't restore telephones. I buy them and look at them. (then pack them away and buy more)
HA! I used to do that too!
Quote from: Jim S. on July 22, 2018, 10:46:27 AM
No matter how discolored , cracked, broken a phone might be, It always has some use as a practice piece for new restoration techniques.
I would save it until you find a new restoration technique to try.
Just my opinion,
Jim S.
I was going to say the same thing, practice your skills.
Continuing, I did the band at the bottom of the base and the handset tonight.
I won't sugar coat this. The base was easy but the handset was so discolored, acetone didn't even cut the burnt orange so I had to resort to scoring the burnt orange with 320 grit dry sandpaper to allow the acetone to get under the discoloration. Besides that, there was a lot of bad plastic removed with the pure acetone which migrated into the K Handset grooves requiring me to remove that plastic after the handset discoloration was gone, before the soft plastic in the grooves hardened.
I have a surgical steel K-wire with a flat sharp point on one end and a blunt round on the other end. That worked well to remove the still soft but hardening plastic in the grooves. The wire is exactly the width of the handset grooves.
When the burn orange was gone, the entire handset was one big "Oh No!" All of the handset surfaces were not pretty, actually, quite ugly. Makes one think, what the heck did I just do, get into. The surface was not anywhere near smooth and some of the removed burnt orange plastic re-hardened on the bright yellow. Rather than do the normal restoration process (10-10-80 with soda, then sanding up), I went right to the brute force sanding process, 329 grit dry paper on a sanding block until all of the solvent grooves were gone, the surface was flat and any of the dark plastic still on in small spots were sanded off.
The big problem here was the really hard burnt orange plastic which did not dissolve with acetone (just like those chips from by toasted ivory 302 that are still soaking in acetone now for 3 months and not dissolved) but the less discolored plastic and the plastic under the removed discoloration was easily dissolved with acetone leaving the areas that were done very susceptible to acetone runs and cloth marks. I've had this happen to me before and there is not way to get around it other than to use brute force stripping and sanding. The saving grace is whatever is left after the discoloration is removed, no matter how ugly, it can be easily sanded smooth because the original color plastic now exposed is soft and easily sanded.
Chemical sanding works but it is different for each plastic and each phone and "Oh,No!" are to be expected. The learning process is figuring out a good and fast way to recover for each new, first time ever seen "Oh, No!" I have yet to ruin (do something that goes beyond repair) any plastic part on any phone.
After the complete 320 grit dry sanding, I went to the 10-10-80 mixture to get rid of the high spots left by the 320 grit paper. At that point I was very happy with what I was holding, the handset, so stopped for the night. The handset turned out quite nice compared to what it looked like at the Oh, No! stage. I have about 4 hours into the restoration not including ringer repair or dial cleaning.
All that remains to do is clean out the grooves and bring the handset up to 2000 grit wet paper and then polishing with Novus 2.
This is what it looks like on my bench tonight - before (left) and after but not finished (right) images were taken in the same place with the same light to show the improvement.
Very nice! Yes it's a lot of work, but isn't the end result worth the hard work?
Nice. It's going to look like brand new when you are finished. Any collector of these type phones will love to have it.
I think "Taps" has turned into The "Rocky" theme!...Looking good!
The above before and after images show the after with a dull, sanded finish.
After cleaning out the handset grooves this morning, I took the handset flat from 600 grit to 2000 grit (using the 10-10-80 solvent with baking soda on high bite cloth) and two applications of Novus (the first mixed with my 10-10-80 solvent) using soft cotton cloth. The baking soda did help in that the amount of time spent with each increasingly higher grit was shorter, about 30 to 45 seconds with each wet grit (the surface was rinsed with water after each solvent/soda application to get rid of the soda residue before going to the next higher sandpaper grit).
This shows the true color of the original plastic (might be a bit off due to the fluorescent tube lighting) and the quality of the sanded surface. I check for flatness by looking at the piece of string (red/white arrow) that vertically crosses the light, the straightness of the light tubes themselves (red/pink arrow) and the quality of the small plastic hemostat (green/white arrow) and the paper clamps (red/pink arrow) that I have attached to the front edge of the front fluorescent light reflector.
The handset flat is not perfectly flat (with its normal curvature) but it's pretty close given the amount of plastic that was removed to get rid of the burnt orange discoloration. Took me less than 10 minutes to go from 600 grit dull to reasonably polished.
Posting this in detail in case anyone wants to try this, so they will have all of the "tools" to end up with similar results. Will do the rest of the phone tonight.
As usual I am totally in awe of your results. You are soooooooo thorough. :)
Except for the finger wheel (waiting for a number card) and a handset cord, the yellow Accent is once again yellow and finished.
The final color, after sanding up to 2000 grit and then polishing with Novus 2 results in a deep, rich yellow which matches the yellow inside the case and on the bottom of the case.
I used Howard's dark Restore-A-Finish on the wicker to get some oil backing to wood.
All of these photos were take in the same place, same light source for a reasonably good comparison.
I will take eBay photos after I find a cord and post them here to finalize this project.
That is nice! Great job. Another one saved.
This picture, taken with my iPhone outdoors on a sunny day by placing the phone in a shaded area, best shows the true color of this phone after restoration and also demonstrated my intense disappointment with the successful but fake PC agenda leading to the destruction/elimination of the Edison lamp in favor of all of the much less desirable light sources which produce partial visible spectum illumination which significantly confuses the chip and software within an iPhone, and other digital cameras, "trying" to produce images that the iPhone "thinks" are color correct (color balanced and intensity corrected) but in reality fail in that effort and end up producing significantly color distorted images.
This is indeed the yellow created by WE years ago and what is seen by the eye, not the camera chip and software under poor artificial light sources.
WOW! What a difference. I started taking pictures of my phones in sunlight for the same reason, I could never get a good color indoors. Looks Great!
Wow indeed. Yes, what a difference. And now I can see the wicker nicely too. :)
I hoarded Edison bulbs starting back in 2010. I have hundreds of 100, 75, and 60 watt bulbs in a storage locker. I agree, nothing produces better light than a good old Edison bulb. I should sell some.
John - I admit that I voted "no" on spending the time/energy here, but wow, another stellar job aided by your honed process. Really nice work!!!
~
John,
What a fantastic job of restoration. I love that shade of yellow. I would say that I would have never thought it would ever look like that again but, I knew if anyone could bring that phone back to it's former glory, it would be you.
You set the bar high for the rest of us...Very Nice!
I think this is a "notable" refurb.
JMO,
Jim S.
Quote from: Jim S. on July 26, 2018, 10:17:39 AM
I think this is a "notable" refurb.
JMO,
Jim S.
Agreed.
When I 1st started reading this thread, I thought yes this phone is "past the point of no return". Very nice job John.
Major Deja Vu opening this thread!
I have the same model but touchtone. It was equally yellowed .
I posted a thread here a while back asking how these handsets come apart and got no answer. Therfore soaking it in anything was out of the question, and I actually began stealing parts off it for other phones
Then I did an oxyclean/bleach with light sanding and 0000 steel wool on the base.
The base was looking good after some work. Put the original parts back in it and had an awful yellow dark handset for some time . I giot tired of look at the dark yellow handset.
Then i took a leap of faith and bacause I did not want steel wool clogging up microphone and speaker (which is magnetic and would attract steel wool particles). I taped over those holes as it was not yellowed there hardly at all.
then I sanded, sanded some more steel wooled , did not like it still then went back to more sanding and steel wool. In the end I did okay considering I was inclined to part it out in the beginniing.
I finished it up with a buffing disk, hand buffing then Turtle Wax.
If you look at the iast image with handset on its side, you can see the yellowing in the recess (where this handet would hang if it were a wall phone) although I did clean up the recess some it was the most difficult. I confirmed this is not lighting rather shows about how it is now. Still dark in that recess.
wow! That's like a completely different phone now! Very nice work as always. While some have said this may not have been worth the time per say, I counter with "getting there is half the fun". I collect WWII era rifles and go out of my way to find the basket case. I find it far more rewarding to rebuild and put my own work into something rather than get a show piece off the shelf. Plus I don't have Doug Rose's luck, so I don't come across show pieces very often ;D
Quote from: AL_as_needed on August 26, 2018, 05:03:28 PM
Plus I don't have Doug Rose's luck, so I don't come across show pieces very often ;D
8)
Those handsets are very difficult to get apart. I have started at the top with a very small flat screwdriver working it in to release the clips that hold the two halves together.
If your not extremely careful, you will crack the upper case.
But I do have to say, you did an excellent job removing the discoloration. You and John did very nice work, congrats.