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.

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.