202/685 short out on Comcast phone line

[Dalexs]

Hi folks,

Phone forum newbie here, but long time telephone worker history...
I've spent some time looking thru all the info, and typical of the internet, I'm loving the wealth of information found here.

A brief history if I may...
My dad was a 40 year veteran of NJ Bell/NYNEX/New England Telephone.
(I also worked for NYNEX for a few years out of school.)

Over the years, he had acquired a number of phones from various job sites, trade outs, upgrades etc...
but never really worked on getting them into regular use around the house.

As an aficionado of art deco and the era of yesteryear, I've always wanted to get these various devices working.

After his passing, I finally got hold of one of these phones, a WE 202 with F1 handset, and I really want to get it working right.
He had a 685a subset, which I wired using Bingster's diagram here
http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=784.0.

When I first got it hooked it right I was amazed at the quality of sound. I even called some folks in the know who couldn't believe what I was using at the time.

Fast forward a bit... I have come to find a number of times that my Comcast Cable phone service seems to short out sometimes.
When I first started troubleshooting, I found disconnecting the subset from the line, everything was fine.

If I plugged it back it back in immediately, it would short out the service again. (Please read as no dial tone, no incoming calls.)

If I waited a period, and plugged it back in back in, everything would be fine.

My thought is that the coil/transformer on the subset is wearing out, or building up some kind of charge or impedence and taking down the VOIP line.

I was hoping I might find some advice here.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

[G-Man]

Use the following diagram from the TCI Library to check your wiring...

[G-Man]

See if the revised diagram is easier to follow...

[unbeldi]

Welcome to the forum!

Is this problem of 'shorting the line' intermittent? Has it got worse over time?

There are several possible wiring schemes for 202 type sets and we should ascertain which you are in fact using.
If you used Bingster's diagram for the 685A you should have a four-conductor cord between the subscriber set and the  telephone unit. Is that correct?

The original cord for a 202 telephone installed before ca. mid-50s, before the 685A was introduced, was a four-conductor cord to be used with a 684A or 634A subscriber set. Later schemes that used a 685A subscriber set used a different wiring scheme, as presented in the diagram just posted.  This was also discussed in this forum thread.

This does not mean that you must have the five-conductor mounting cord. Bingster's method is a valid and perfectly well functioning configuration and has the advantage of preserving the original cord without any modification to the telephone set.

Induction coils, as well as the integrated networks of the 685A don't often fail. This is an extremely rare case.  But sometimes, still rarely, we do find bad ringing capacitors.  The ringing capacitor is also built into the 425 network. If your line is seized just by plugging the unit into the line, I would first suspect this capacitor to be shorted. It is internally connected between the A and the K terminal on the network block. You can test it by simply disconnecting either A or K, and plugging the subset into your line.  This only disables the ringer, everything else in the telephone should work just fine. It will help locate the trouble spot to either the ringing circuit or the audio side.

[Dalexs]

Thanks for the quick replies folks.
unbeldi, correct, I used the wire scheme that Bingster posted on page one for the setup.

I'll pull those 2 new diagrams this weekend and double check the wiring.

Unfortunately, I haven't had the set in action long enough to say if it has gotten worse.
But it seems like consistent behavior however.
(I'm a software QA engineer, and in my world we call that a bug!  )

I'd love to get this working well, because my dad also had a candlestick in the collection which
I would love to see working too!

Thanks again for the info. 

Steve