Wait For Dial Tone

The cradle presents its own set of problems, not the least of which is the need to zap it from a dozen different directions to get an evenly-applied coat.

This is the second trip the cradle has made to the paint booth. The first application was very uneven, so after sanding out the roughest spots I tried again this afternoon. I'm less than pleased with the result. You can easily see the globby paint inside the cradle arms.

I've started doing a little research on the interwebs after noting that the handset that came with this phone was a transplant. It's not even a Western Electric handset. From what I can tell, the 202 should have an E1 handset, which has a knobby look and a mouthpiece with a "spit cup." I found a few on e-bay, but none at the bargain prices my skinflint sensibilities will let me bid on.

After cleaning my Western Electric 302 this afternoon, I strongly suspect the dial of my 202 is a transplant, too. It's got a plastic number card under the finger wheel; the 302's dial had a porcelain face. What are the odds that Western Electric would have used plastic in the earlier version of their desk phones, and porcelain in later versions? Smells fishy to me.

Wait For Dial Tone

... and this is about forty-five minutes after spraying one coat as light as I could get it using a can of Krylon. It's probably my most successful attempt so far. There are some scratches evident in the paint, but I'm thinking of overspraying with a clear fixative and polishing it a bit to see how that looks.

Wait For Dial Tone

It usually looks pretty good while the paint is still wet ...

Wait For Dial Tone

Here's another reason I don't want to rush into painting anything. This is the D1 base of a Western Electric 202, and I've been trying for almost two weeks to apply a smooth coat of glossy black paint to it, but the damned paint keeps krinkling up like this around the shoulders. The last coat I gave it got me so cheesed off I set it aside for three days before I came back to it this afternoon with a patch of 100 grit paper, sanded off three or four layers, smoothed it over with some 220 grit and put it in the paint booth to give it another zap.

Wait For Dial Tone

The reassembled dial after cleaning. The face is badly scratched and the paint is worn from inside most of the fingerholes, but I didn't want to repaint it today, if I ever do. I don't necessarily want it to look pristine. The scratches aren't especially good-looking, but the worn finger holes give the dial a comforting feeling of constant use. I'll have to give a good, long think to whether or not I'll repaint it.

Wait For Dial Tone

With the finger wheel removed, the dial cleans up easily. It looks and feels like porcelain. That part number would probably tell me exactly what it was made of and when, if I knew where to look. A quick googling doesn't clear up the question, though.

Most people who restore phones take the whole thing apart before they even start cleaning, but all I wanted to do today was clean the dust and grease off the parts so that, after making a call, I wouldn't have the same uneasy feeling I get when I give my nose a quick wipe without the benefit a handkerchief. Not that I would ever do such a revolting thing. Ever. Forget I said that.

Wait For Dial Tone

The first working dial telephone I bought from an e-bay auction was this Western Electric Model 302, and I liked it so much that I wired a 4-prong outlet in the living room so I could plug it in and use it right away.

I had to give the handset a good, long scrubbing in warm, soapy water before My Darling B would even consider using it, though. She'll put up with a lot of weirdness from me, but her love has its limits.

I swore I'd get around to cleaning and refurbishing the rest of the phone at a later date, to be determined by the availability of time and funds and, little by little, I've managed to keep up an erratic schedule of restoring it to something close to its former glory. I replaced the cords a week or two ago, and today I took it to the basement to take apart and clean the dial which, you can see here, is still covered in nearly sixty years of grunginess.

A Cookie You Can Believe In

Seen at the farmer's market this weekend: The Obama Cookie. Way cool. McCain doesn't have a cookie. This may be a game-changer.

When My Darling B handed over the cash to pay for it, the guy standing in line behind her said, "He's going to give you change you can believe in."

ba-dum-bum! tssss ...

Mystery Photo #42

I took the bottom off this and snapped a photo before taking everything apart so that I'd have a reference when the time came to put it all back together. It needed cleaning and painting, and all the wires and circuits had to come out before I could even begin. First correct guess wins an Oreo, America's Favorite Cookie!

Bigger is Better

When we bought Our Humble O'Bode, I was thrilled to find that one of the previous owners had been a handyman who set up a work shop in the basement. He had saved an end table from the garbage to use as a bench, and hung his tools from a 4x4 piece of peg board he screwed to the wall.

The down side was that the work shop was shoehorned into a narrow space that used to be storage for the storm windows, between the lavatory and a finished room. I couldn't build anything bigger than a bird house in there.

But this season's going to be different. I talked My Darling B into letting me knock down a wall and make the work shop big enough to move around in. With this kind of room, I might be able to take on a more ambitious project than a bird house, too.

For a view of the work shop shortly after we moved in, take a look at this.

Lair Transplant

Behold, the contents of my basement lair, removed to its new location.

Each night this week, I would spend about an hour unloading books from one of these bookshelves, piling them on the floor, dragging the book case from the semi-finished room to this corner, and restacking the books on the shelves.

Actually, after the bookcase on the right, the next think I moved was the stereo, so I could listen to Etta James while I moved the rest of the books.

I dragged the desk out right in the middle of the move, just to break up the monotony, and to give me the idea to stand the two peewee bookshelves in front of it. It was a eureka moment.

By Thursday night, I was done.

It's a lot less crowded than it looks, although the sofa will have to go. I'm going to ask Tim to help me drag it out to the curb this morning and prop a "Free To A Good Home" sign on it in the hopes that it'll be gone by Sunday night and we won't have to drag it back downstairs.

The new corner lair does need a better set of lights, but that might have to wait a little while. For now, it's bright enough for the kind of goofing off I do.

Guy Food Night

Nothing like that smell, is there?

Thursday night is guy food night, an old O-Folk tradition that stretches back two, maybe three years. It's the night when the guys cook, so My Darling B doesn't have to.

The trouble with this great idea is, I can cook two things: breakfast, or a thick slab of meat on the grill. For tonight's meal, I chose to serve breakfast.

Make room! Make room!

An "after" snapshot to compare to last Wednesday's. So much demolition has been going on here, it's hard to correlate this to anything in the previous photo. The saws on the peg board to the left are in both photos.

A New Coat of Paint

Old coat, no coat, new coat.

The darkest wine-colored paint is the color we picked out for the top coat, called "Cottage Red" in the Benjamin-Moore vocabulary of color. I couldn't wait any longer to see what it looked like so, while I was at the store to pick up another gallon of primer, I asked the paintmeister to mix up a quart of it so I could slap it on the back corner of the house.

My Darling B approves.

A New Coat of Paint

It's the final coat of paint without the distracting purple primer or any bare boards to muck up the view. I'm very relieved to find it covers very nicely with one coat.

Make room! Make room!

Only the skeletal outline of the closet that once jutted into the corner of the work shop, taking up valuable floor space, remained in this photo I took two nights ago. Since then, I've pulled down the shelves to the right, most of the rest of the furring strips framing the wall, and started pulling down the gypsum board.

That stuff all takes up room in the garbage can, the only way I have to get rid of the stuff, which is why I'm going slow.

I've also got to work out what I'm going to do with all the books in the lair. There's a couple hundred to move and I'm not looking forward to it. My Darling B has consented to let me move some of them upstairs. Eventually I'd like to build a wall-to-wall book shelf in the living room and move most of them up there, where we can get at them and they'll look much cooler.

Make room! Make room!

It's raining today, so as I was looking around for a indoor project I thought, hey, it's about time to flip the workshop door over.

The door to the work shop opened in the wrong direction. It had always opened into the work shop, and the hinge was on the wrong side so that, when the door was open, it blocked the very narrow entrance. Totally ganked up.

The simplest way to fix it would be to remove the door, but I liked that door and the work shop should probably be closed off from the rest of the basement, to keep the sawdust in. So I decided the door had to stay.

The next simplest way to fix it, I thought innocently, would be to flip the hinges around so it opened into the stairway. So I marked the door jamb, sharpened my chisel and started cutting.

Two hours later I was still learning lessons in how to hang a door. Here's a very important bit of information: get somebody who knows what they're doing to help you.

And yet, somehow, I still managed to get it flipped over well before supper time. Here's the door hanging ajar in its new, correctly hung direction.

The whole point of this endeavor was to make more room in the work shop for the projects I hope to get done this winter. There's just one more little thing I'd like to do. See that wall in the background? It's coming down.

Bringing in the potatoes

My Darling B went through the potato patch with her trusty fork, hoping to find the last of the big baking potatoes to put up for the winter. There were precious few to be found. Most were teensy-tiny and covered in malformed knobs, and a few had been in the ground far too long; they went straight to the compost heap.

Then we spent the afternoon scraping paint off the siding. I even slapped some primer on the corner, so I wouldn't lie awake tonight thinking of how rotten the wood panels would get after soaking all day in rain that's predicted for tomorrow.

If the browned corn stalks in the background don't say autumn, I don't know what does.

Hello, Central!

After I moved the phone from the kitchen to the living room, I decided I hated the cordless model we had. I'm pretty sure I've always hated it. The sound quality of the handset is terrible and the ringer makes the most annoying bleat ever heard by a human ear.

I wanted another, better phone but, frankly, I'm not as jazzed about cordless models as I used to be. If I got a phone with a cord, though, I'd have to teach myself not to walk too far from the base. That could be a trick. I'd also have to learn to put up with the base jumping up at me every time I lifted the receiver. What brain-dead designer thought making the base light as a feather was a good idea, anyway? When did people start to think it was a bad thing for the base to be heavy as a cinder block, so it would stay rooted in one spot?

The more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I was with virtually every phone we've had since I bought an old rotary phone at a garage sale fifteen years ago and used it as an extension phone. There wasn't anything great about it. It was a basic, beige table phone right out of the 1970's but it worked great. Tim, who was about three years old at the time, watched me plug it in and listen to the dial tone on the receiver, then spin the dial. "Cool!" he said, watching the dial return to zero. There was a pause of about a heartbeat before he asked, "What is it?"

Suddenly, I wanted one.

So I went cruising e-bay to see if there were any for sale. Holey cheese, were there ever. The trouble was not finding a dial phone, the trouble was finding one for less than ten bucks. People have made a hobby out of collecting them. The upside is, those old phones look really cool now!

The one I finally found for our living room table is a Western Electric model 302 from the 1940's. I was amazed that it not only worked right out of the box, but that I could dial out. Our phone service still supports pulse dialing, how quaint. When the new set of cords I've ordered arrives I'll break it all down and give it a thorough cleaning. In the meantime I washed the grubbiness off the handset with warm, soapy water and a couple washcloths. Otherwise, My Darling B wouldn't touch it.

Tim still loves to spin the dial. I showed him how to make the phone ring and he won't stop doing that, either.

What's better than a Bernina?

Hmmm ... let's see ... the love of your life ... a day off from work ... a six-pack of Mad Town Nut Brown ... oh, lots of things.

What I should have more properly asked was, What's better for sewing than a Bernina? And the answer would be, of course, that nothing is better for sewing than a Bernina except two Berninas.

My Darling B won this classic Bernina at an estate sale. It runs like a top and she walked away with it after being the only bidder. She had to part with a single sawbuck for the privilege. There's a pretty good story about how that played out, but I've already written it out once before.

I convinced My Darling B to crank it up the other night and hem a pair of trousers I bought at the irregular store. The tag said it was a 33/35 but it was more like a 33/49. When I put them on, the waist fit perfectly but the legs bunched up around my ankles like a pair of dad's slacks on an eight-year-old.