A bit of post-holiday fun today - a quick writeup on transforming an antique phone into a mail organizer.
This phone was given to me by my parents some years ago. They had purchased a number of them years ago here in West Michigan - as I recall the story was the phone company was selling these off after transitioning to newer technology some time in the 1960’s. Dad had rigged up two as an intercom between the house and garage, and the leftovers were stored.
After receiving this one it was stored longer - in our early married years we moved a few times and never wanted to mount it until we had settled down. I came across the phone again in a purging binge and decided it either had to be sold off or used - I was tired of it sitting on a shelf. Some time online checking it’s potential value found that we weren’t going to make a house payment by selling it, so I decided to put it to use instead. Some measuring and experimentation found that its interior dimensions were well-suited to holding normal size envelopes, so I set about reclaiming it as a mail organizer.
The first order of business was to remove most of the guts of the phone—a bit of a pity since you could still turn the crank and make the bells ring.
Then I got some scrap sheet metal, and a few hours with a cut-off wheel and my welder netted an organizer rack to fit in where the hand-crank original generator was:
I made another shelf for the lower portion of the phone - so now incoming and outgoing mail store in the top and notecards/postage store in the bottom:
Looking to mount the phone it was clear the best place was right over the live phone jack. Which, of course, I couldn’t do without making the phone actually ring. So I purchased this Remote Bell Ringer for Radio Shack and installed it into the phone (you can see it in the previous picture in the middle shelf area). The ringer uses an actual brass bell - so the phone rings and sounds almost authentic. It’s a bit muted being inside the door but still plenty loud. There’s just something pleasing about it’s sound that’s missing in newer electronic phones.
Here’s the phone mounted into place:
I love these kinds of projects - turning something old and beautiful but essentially useless into something old, beautiful and useful.
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Sparky on June 02, 2008
Doy on July 25, 2008
Martin on January 23, 2009