While cleaning out junk from unused rooms at the church, I found a box that contained (among other things) a 5-line ITT telephone (model 564 vintage 1976 or so)

About the only physical problem I can see is that the plastic finger wheel is not secured very well. The dial turns, but it is prone to sliding.

I'm guessing that there is a retaining clip of some sort under the paper "desi" in the center of the dial, but how do I get at it?

I tried sticking a pin in the hole towards the center of the dial, but I think that might be used to release the dial from the spring underneath.

Turn the dial all the way 0 to stop put a paper clip in the hole depress and turn dial a little more cw and lift it off. There will be a nut under there that is probably loose.

Edit: to correct a few errors.

I'll give it a try when I get back home and see what happens.

Thanks Bill!

If you find that the finger wheel itself is damaged, let me know. I have hundreds of them.

Ed -

Did you corner the market? Are you patiently waiting for the return of Rotary?

Sam

Nah, we used to do a lot of government work and stocked up on maintenance parts.

That might be the case (damaged finger wheel), Once I can get look underneath, I'll post my findings.

Since we haven't had the Stromberg 1A2 for a few years, the phone will become more of a trophy.

Could be someone just put it on cockeyed too.

I had some Stromberg Rotary sets (on a government job, of course) where the dial spring would loosen up. We would remove the dial, unhook the wire, pull it tight with a pair of long nose, hook it back up and clip the excess with diagonals.

Now when the dials on my AT&T 85XX sets go, I have to throw the whole set out.

Sad.

Sam

edited for spelling and content by the poster (who should look before he hits post)

I managed to get the plastic dial off, but it required some prying. No matter how far I pushed the retaining clip down and turned, the dial would not release.

Once I got it off, I used a 1/4" socket to tighten the center bolt, bent the retaining clip back into shape as best I could and pushed the dial back on.

The dial is very slightly off index, but given that the phone will probably never be used again, it really doesn't look all that bad and the dial now spins quite nicely.

Well heck, it should have come right off unless something was damaged to begin with.

The card in the center of the dial had been flipped over at some point so I can only guess how, whoever did the work, went about removing it. :shrug: :confused:

I'm going to look for a schematic and try to wire a temporary modular plug. I'd like to see how well this thing works.

Off subject:
Are rotary phones used anymore (at least in the US)???

I was at a museum and the grandmother was explaining to her young grandaughters how the rotary phone on display worked. They had no idea other than it was a phone but were mystified by the fingerwheel.

Now I feel old,
Sam

Oh yes, there are still plenty of them out there. The federal government still uses them in some places here in DC. My 17 year old son has a black 554 on the wall in his bedroom because he thought it was "cool".

I've also seen some that were still in use. They had these cool mechanical-style pencils (with a small, globe-shaped magnifying glass at the end of them) tied to each phone with a string. I should have asked them about it, but I didn't. I'm guessing that this was to both magnify the phone book pages, while also fitting inside the rotary dial circles so that they could dial their phones without ruining their fingernails? :shrug:

up here in montreal land there was a general foods plant that had a 1A2 system running till last year (most of it is now in my basement) the metro (subway) uses all AE rotary phones, olympic stadium too!

I used to work for a moving company and I was surprised how common they still were, particularly in older people's apartments along Park Ave. One of those buildings even still had a rotary payphone in the service entrance area.

When I was still in High School I worked at a Ace Hardware that was a agent for AT&T Consumer Lease Services and almost daily we'd do transactions involving rotary phones, I remember one guy upgraded his Princess to Touch-Tone. His old rotary princess (white) was particularly nice so during my lunch break I ran home and got a worn out blue Princess and exchanged it for his nice one (CLS doesn't keep track of color, so any phone they get back is OK as long as it's the same model). Needless to say, though, most transactions were returns and canceling the account.

Sorry to pull my own topic further off track but renting telephones in this day & age really doesn't make much sense (Residential of course).

Old Western Electric 500, 1500 and 2500 telephones are always available for purchase on eBay. Except for the 1500s (which almost always sell for big money) these telephones tend to be inexpensive.

I've been buying (garage sales, hamfests, flea markets, etc.) and selling (eBay) Western Electric customer premises equipment for over 12 years and I've never seen a 1500 in real life... and I got all kinds of unusual stuff like the old "portable" conference phone, a phone built into an outdoors enclosure, a 464G (1A2 type phone based on the 302), etc.... but never seen a 1500!

back in the mid '80's I was involved with some "refurbing" we used to make 1500's and 3500's out of 500's and 554's all the time .

(actually this is the first I recall hearing the 1500 designation.) as I recall the 1500 style weren't popular and didn't sell so we didn't do many . 3500 conversions sold well people liked the large size vs 2554's

1500 for sale on eBay.

With so few people having touch-tone service back in the 60s coupled with the (what I've been told was) high rental fee, I'm not surprised that the 1500 was uncommon.

I have a 1500 at home...got it at a garage sale

ok so 1500 is 2500 with a 10 button dial ?

I was thinking it was a 500 with a round insert and tt dial (didnt look close enough at this picture ) :rolleyes:

Yes, the 15XX series was the standard touch-tone dial pad minus the * and # keys.

was there a "official" designation for 500 conversions ?

(500 set , round insert and standard TT dial ? )

desk version of this 3554

Not really. Bell (Western Electric) never did that; it was one or the other. They had the bucks to simply replace the whole set and be done with it. ITT and Stromberg-Carlson came up with the blank that allowed a rotary dial to be replaced with a tone dial in an existing 5XX set. I'm sure that they had number for the physical part, but I don't remember it.

I was told that these conversions only became necessary because tone dialing took off a lot faster than many independent telcos expected.

ITT and S/C were the primary hardware suppliers to the independent telcos that had small budgets. They came up with these conversion options to help them increase monthly billing revenue at minimum cost. These conversions were done in the field by a telco technician. There were also thirteen color options for rented phones at that time.

These conversions also helped the manufacturers deal with a dramatic drop in sales of rotary-dial sets when they had tens of thousands of them sitting in inventory. Tone dialing took off like crazy in the early 1970's at a pace that the phone manufacturers couldn't support.

That was also back in the days when the phone cost was $25.00 and a technician worked for a third of that. Now, they work for more than the cost of the phone, so field conversions are out of the question.

LoL I think all of the surplus rotary dial sets went to the military!

Hey Ed, I guess if I have a spare 65 bucks I can finally get that orange phone I wanted!
https://www.oldphones.com/servlet/Detail?no=7

Actually, WE/AT&T did indeed reuse former rotary (500) sets to create 2500 sets. I have several examples in my collection. The rotary dial mounting posts in a 500 set are too far apart to be used to mount a 35-type dial, so there were two ways that they did it.

The first way was typical Bell Labs thoughtful and elegant engineering: the TT dial was first screwed into 2 small gray plastic spacers,
then the spacers were set into the dial mounting posts.

The second method was indicative of the gradual mental illness that beset the once beautiful mind of the Bell System: The dial posts were just bent inward until you could just barely get the TT dial mounting screws to reach. This resulted in the faceplate not quite sitting correctly, and the case was a bit skewed. But hey, "We're the phone company, and we don't care."

Dial posts bent inward to "make it work" sounds to me more like the work of a field technician that ran out of/didn't have any of the aforementioned spacers, or simply didn't care and just wanted to "make it work", rather than an officially prescribed practice.

That's what it sounds like to you, and would seem to be the only logical explanation. What it is, is as described, unfortunately. The posts are bent by a machine of some sort.

I suppose when your spending millions (billions?) of dollars on lawyers attempting to fend off lawsuits both from the government and entrepreneurs attempting to get a slice of the telecommunications pie, you have to cut corners somewhere!

This thread has sure been around the horn a couple times. I think it's time to put it to bed.