Getting an AE90 to work on a standard phone line

[LarryInMichigan]

I do not have an AE90 for comparison, but none of the contacts should be bent like the one in your picture.  You might also want to check the handset cord and contacts.

Regarding the ringer, yours is a 30 Hz frequency ringer which was not designed to ring on the standard 20 Hz ringer signal.  Since 30 Hz is not quite so far away from 20 Hz, it is likely to vibrate enough to hit the gongs when they are very close.  If you want the phone to ring properly, you can replace the ringer with a "straight line" 20 Hz ringer.  Someone here can probably provide one or you might be able to get one from Steve Hilsz (www.phonesurplus.com) or Adele Vaverchak(http://shop.ebay.com/adele0283/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p3686).

Larry

[fluffy]

I do not have an AE90 for comparison, but none of the contacts should be bent like the one in your picture.  You might also want to check the handset cord and contacts.

Thanks. I've verified that when I short out the right contacts in the hook switch, the phone captures the line and the handset gets the dialtone, loopback, etc., so the handset cord is clearly working fine.

Regarding the ringer, yours is a 30 Hz frequency ringer which was not designed to ring on the standard 20 Hz ringer signal.  Since 30 Hz is not quite so far away from 20 Hz, it is likely to vibrate enough to hit the gongs when they are very close.  If you want the phone to ring properly, you can replace the ringer with a "straight line" 20 Hz ringer.  Someone here can probably provide one or you might be able to get one from Steve Hilsz (www.phonesurplus.com) or Adele Vaverchak(http://shop.ebay.com/adele0283/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p3686).

Thanks. The bell adjustment that I did makes it sound quite nice and loud enough for my purposes, but if I decide to upgrade later I'll keep those sources in mind.

[fluffy]

Looks like this is the closest diagram: http://sc.infc.info/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=265&Itemid=31
Look at the last ae90 diagram.

The colors do not match.
At your telephone it looks like Whit ends at L2 and Red ends at 2
Black should end at L1 and yellow should end at 11
Orange gos to 3 and has no function.
Green should end at 13.

The upper contact (Green - Brown) shorts the receiver in on-hook position.
If this not working, just remove the green from 13, and tape the end.

The Red and White should close in off-hook position and open in on-hook position.
The same for Yellow and Black.
If only one of these works, just strap the other two.

dsk

Ah, thanks for the information. It sounds like mine is a pretty atypical model (or was modified in a strange way), so I'm pretty much on my own. Hopefully I can make sense of this and get a working phone eventually.

Thanks for all your help!  I'll be sure to post more here if I get it working.

[fluffy]

I have nothing new to add about my phone, except that tonight I was watching the Twin Peaks pilot episode and recognized the very distinctive sound of a ringing AE90 before the camera panned over to it.  I just thought that was pretty incredible.

[fluffy]

Just decided to spend a bit of time on this project again.  Strapping red and white (via 8/L2 and 2) seems to have done the trick. Thanks!

Red and white were the two which I was shorting out to get a dial tone before.  I wasn't sure if shorting them out would allow the line to open up and the ringer to work and so on when it was on-hook, but it seems to work perfectly.

Now I just need to figure out an attractive way of mounting this and then I'll have a wonderful built-in classic phone working in my kitchen.  Thank you so much for your help!

[GG]

Re. mounting:  What I've done on one occasion was to mount an appropriately sized & finished piece of 3/4" thick plywood to a stud in the wall, with two drywall screws long enough to bite into the stud (1-3/4"?).   Then I could safely mount any wallphone I chose on the plywood using short screws, without putting any more holes in the wall itself, or worrying about alignment of the phone with the stud. 

It would help to make the backboard tall enough to accommodate a 42-A connecting block (oldschool 4-terminal block, Bell System) or its AE equivalent at the bottom corner, leaving enough room that in the event you ever put a WE 554 on there, you can reach the housing release latch at the bottom.  The point of the connecting block is, you can terminate the house station wiring to that block, and then run a short length of wire from the block into the phone, thereby not having to mess with (and possibly shorten) the house station wiring further.  (And/or put a modular cover on that block and you also have a place to plug in an answering machine or other device.)

The extra space at the bottom of the backboard also leaves room for customized devices such as residential hold/transfer buttons or whatever, mounted in outboard boxes, thus adding functionality without need of modifying the phone itself. 

[fluffy]

I had wired a modular phone cord to the AE90, and am looking at ways that I can make a simple box that I mount to the wall and then mount the AE90 to the box.  I'm just making sure there's enough internal clearance inside the box for the modular cord to stick out of the jack, and also for a DSL filter (since the whole reason I even started down this path is because I had to get a landline for DSL service anyway, so I figured if I was going to put the landline to use I'd might as well get something that looks nice).

I tried whipping up a prototype tonight, but unfortunately the screws and drywall anchors I had lying around were very low-quality and the heads got stripped, so I ended up having to destroy the scrapwood that I was mounting it to in order to get it off. At least I didn't end up damaging the phone.

[AE_Collector]

It really shouldn't be that complicated to attach to the wall. There are two tabs on the top and one on the bottom with holes in each of them to put screws through and into the wall. There is lots of clearance around the case of a 90 to bring a modular cord from inside the phone to the outside against the wall.

If there is a modular jack already on the wall that you want to mount the phone over, they did make modular adapter plates to mount on the back of AE 90's that will make them attach to a modular wall plate. However my opinion is that they detract from the look of the 90 as it adds a fair bit of depth to the phone.

If the wall jack is mounted on an electrical box or a mud ring in the wall, remove the modular jack, plug the 90's modular cord into the jack and stuff the jack into the box or the wall cavity. If the jack is mounted to the wall without a box behind it remove it and hard wire the phone cable onto the 90 or hide the jack inside the 90's case.

Terry

[fluffy]

Perhaps I was overthinking the problem. What can I say, I'm an engineer.   There is indeed an existing modular wall jack that I wanted to mount it over, and I didn't want the added clearance caused by a baseplate adapter (I want a nice flush installation) but it seems like just removing the wall jack plate and replacing it with a free-floating modular jack in a hole in the wall would be just fine.  Thanks, I'll consider that option.

[fluffy]

Thanks for everyone's help. The phone looks and works great!

[dsk]

Nice to see a good result, Congratulation with a nice working telephone.

dsk