atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Verizon Payphones

Send me a picture of the lock, I might be able to help. Locks are a major hobby of mine!

Those locks are unique and you will not be able to just find keys for them.

Bell Telephone/Verizon used a specific lock maker. I have their name and number somewhere. I will find it and I will PM you the name and phone number. I doubt, seriously, if they will help you as all those pay phone locks are serialized and Verizon and that company keep very good records.

The upside of drilling out the existing locks is that you can pick up a pair of exact same replacement locks and keys for that payphone.

Rcaman

I have two suggestions:

1. Contact the ATCA and find out the name of the person who now furnishes payphone locks and keys to collectors, now that the guru, Paul Vaverchak, is no longer with us.

2. Take a hammer drill, set it to "hammer only" insert a steel pin or dull drill bit in the 0.5" size and place it against the locks. The vibration will loosen the nuts on the studs that hold the locks in the phone. The nuts will fall into the phone and the locks can be pushed into the phone.

Doesn't anyone else here think, when you pick up a phone, you should get dialtone?

They are lucky no one tried to use it for an emergency.

To prevent any usage, the payphone could be wrapped in something...such as a plastic bag...and a piece of paper with the words "Out of Order" taped to it.

Old timers might not. You used to not get dial tone until you put money in. I believe they were called "pre-pay" lines.

Sam

Yes, "coin first" on an open tip line. Worked to deter fraud. That was the standard coin line, at least, around here for Bell Telephone/Verizon. When COCOT came into being, the payphones were supplied with just a 1MB loop start line.

Rcaman

I hate when people sidetrack threads with unrelated chatter, but this thread reminded me of something that I thought any of you might appreciate:

It is rare around here to encounter a payphone, and if you do, they aren't telco-owned, they are COCOTs (bandit payphones as I refer to them). Most don't work or are a complete ripoff anyway.

Recently, a friend came over who is about 30 years my junior. He hadn't paid his bill for his Sprint cell phone and was subsequently dead in the water. He asked if he could use my land line phone to call them in order to make a payment. I turned my desk phone around on the table toward him. This is where it gets funny.

First, he asked me how to use it. When he lifted the handset, he heard dial tone and didn't have a clue what that 'buzzing' meant (his words). I explained that he just needs to dial the digits as he would do on his iPhone.

He did this and then asked me if there was anything else he should do, as in "where is the send button?". Yes, he really did ask me where the send button was on my SLT. I laughed inside my head on this one because I couldn't blame his ignorance upon my experience. Oh, it's fun getting old.

That NYC is a dead giveaway In our little corner of the world, we had POSTPAY. You know, the kind where you could SHOUT into the receiver and your folks would be able to know to pick you up at some such place.

That's pathetic. When I was a kid I never saw a crank phone but I would be smart enough to know how to use it if I encountered one. You should have done him a favor and taken his damn iPhone, thrown it on the floor and stomped on it. IT'S ROTTING HIS BRAIN!

The cell phone is the worst invention EVER.

-Hal