Another noob' question? If I may?
I suspect just from my own proclivities that the "ideal" antique phone, the "jewel" in a collection, would have nearly if not completely identical parts. A W.E. D-1/E-1 combo with constituent parts all made in 1934 for example.
But almost any surviving phone will not come from the W.E. museum, or have been found hiding on a shelf in the W.E./Bell/ATT warehouse, IYGMD? The phones we now collect "lived" out here, "in the wild..." with us. Our grandparents, 'rents, and we, dropped them, sneezed and coughed on them, used them (especially the handsets) as hammers, and even threw them at our recalcitrant spouses (well, before domestic violence litigation became so
de rigueur).
"How much" of all the disparity in phone components' dates is "no doubt" the result of haggard repairmen replacing defective/malfunctioning/defunct parts; do we know? I.E., isn't it "most likely" that an original D-1 dated IV/34 had had a defective 557B replaced by one dated IV/37, and then later have a poor F-1 replaced by one dated 5/40? Later still, however, a noobie collector
may have acquired that D-1 and, to improve it for his/her collection, replaced the dial with a 6A dated 9/54. But isn't it just as possible that ALL that work was done by Bell-system repairmen, during the "life" of the phone? After all D-1s were still in service, so I read, as late as the early 1960s?
I'd like to know what others think about that scenario. But I'd also like to ask, does anyone know how much
non-W.E. part-swapping happened in "real life?" Would a Leich handset ever replace an W.E. E-1 or F-1 handset on a W.E. D-1 mount? How about an Automatic Electric handset? Or, an A.E. dial?
Just asking!!!