Give Me A Call

The paint job on the Western Electric 202 turned out pretty good after all.

I bought a spray can of clear coat that put a beautiful finish on it, not glossy but semi-gloss. It looks just right on a telephone body.

The next problem is the handset. The one that came with the phone is a transplant. The 202 is an elegant-looking phone, but it needs a genuine E1 handset with a "spit cup" mouth piece or it just doesn't have the same character. I'm scoping out sales on e-bay for the real thing and have found several in the past two weeks, but they're expensive. I may have to make due with the transplant for a while.

It's so heavily pitted that it'll take quite a bit of sanding and buffing before it comes close to matching the finish on the body.

The cord's pretty nasty, but I'll order a cloth-covered cord new from House of Telephones on payday. That ought to give me enough time to polish a good-looking shine on the handset.

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.