Plaidophile

Yep, I just got another phone. Although "new" isn't really the right term for it...

This phone was made in 1965, and is from an era when your phone was rented to you by the phone company and was just an extension of the phone line itself; mounted directly to the wall, and patched directly in to the line. It's a phone where when you dial it it means you actually dial, and it has that distinctive old-circuitry smell, like my grandfather's basement.

Unfortunately, this has the problem that it comes from an era when the phone line was operating at a very specific voltage and line frequency, and after finding a wiring diagram for it (as there are many resources online for vintage phones!) to wire a modular phone cord to the circuit board (this is one of the first phones to use a PCB!), I was unable to get it to capture the line. My line voltage doesn't seem to be enough to cause it to loop back, and the ring voltage isn't enough to make the ringer ring (although the clapper does wiggle back and forth a bit). And when I pick it up, it doesn't capture the line.

It could be that some of the components are bad, or perhaps even the off-hook mechanism needs tuning (it appears to be a physical magnetic switch with some very specific fiddly flexing that needs to happen, and this has probably been in storage for a couple decades).

From what I can tell, the ringer is a "frequency ringer," as opposed to a "straight line ringer." That's about all I can find out about it, though, and I'm not even sure what those terms even mean in this context.

This is the second phone I've bought for the purpose of having functional retro "art" to cover the unsightly wall jack in my kitchen. This one looks much nicer than the previous one (an ivory-colored AT&T thing from what looks like the 80s), which also doesn't work quite right (its particular dysfunction is that when a call comes in, it immediately captures the line without ringing, and stays captured as long as the call is active), but it seems that the (relatively) newer one is more likely to become workable. I could always try fixing the newer phone's circuitry and then painting the casing or something, but considering how little I use the phone I'm much more likely to just mount the older phone on the wall, leave it nonfunctional, and call it a day.

Or I could just cover the wall jack with a painting, but that's less entertaining.