Ring Ring--Who's There?
Those who saw my rant on phones in my October 27, 2007 entry will have to forgive me for compromising a little. I bought a brand-new Cortelco 2554 (PDF) on eBay that same day, and it arrived a few days ago. It's not made out of Cycolac, and the plastic case isn't quite as thick as the venerable Western Electric 2554 that it's modeled on, but after some testing I'm confident that it has a very tight hold on the mounting plate, and won't go flying without a great deal of persuasion. Even if it did, the thing is ruggedly built and I have some hope it would survive the adventure. Alas, Cortelco doesn't make them in green, so I had to take brown and like it. With shipping, it cost me just over $40.
But people, it has a bell. It doesn't beep. It rings.
That said (and as much as I disdain some of the fritzy new phone features that Radio Shack's phones are crusty with) Caller ID does have its uses, and I had a standalone Caller ID box on the shelf from forever ago. So I did a little sheet metal work, made a bracket, and managed to mount the Caller ID box to the phone without drilling any holes in the phone, or even removing the plastic case from the (metal! Gloriosky!) frame. What I did is slip the aluminum bracket between the phone's plastic case and its metal frame at the top edge. Simple friction holds it there, and because there's not a lot of finger work in using a Caller ID box, I don't think it'll get loose or start shifting around.
The rear view is below. It took me very little time to make the bracket. What tripped me up was the difficulty of connecting a short run of modular phone cord to the wall plate's internal junction posts through a small hole in the edge of the plate. The modular cord's wires aren't wires, strictly speaking: They're thin spirals of copper wound around a core of threadlike fiber. I had to solder the wires to a couple of very small solder lugs and get the lugs under the screws inside the wall plate, which was more like neurosurgery than I like in electronics projects. But it's done, it works, and I have a real phone in the shop again. Whew.
