10 replies to this topic

[Emax]

I've been working my way through all of our Stromberg / U.S. Instruments / Dynalec sound-powered phone sets - and I came across one that it seems was actually on a Navy ship. Did an extra nice restoration on it.

Vintage about 1941.

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[lastchair_44]

Nice find! Apparently we have a few of those floating around too

[hyak.net]

Cool.. I have a large collection of old phones. I used to work for Stromberg-Carlson too in 1990/91 during the time when Siemens bought them and ended an era of a classic american company.

[Aussierob]

We have a heap of these all over the place on the lifts. Unfortunately it doesn't matter how bomber you make them, lifties will always try to make a 5 foot cord reach 6 feet, and one of the cord connections will fail.

[lastchair_44]

or they drop 'em or slam them down on the console those mouth piece/ear pieces can be a pain the arse to fix getting the little diaphram just right in the middle

[Emax]

"lifties will always try to make a 5 foot cord reach 6 feet, and one of the cord connections will fail"

"or they drop 'em or slam them down on the console"

See the sticker in the "saved by the sign" post

[Allan]

Looks good Emax! We have a bunch of them too - from Blackcomb. I'll have to look at them a little closer! We tape our buttons down because some of our less intelligent operators can't figure out how to use them.

[Emax]

"We tape our buttons down because some of our less intelligent operators can't figure out how to use them."

A photo of a more elegant solution to that problem will follow tomorrow. We use the pushbutton handsets in the machine room only - to avoid the motor noise on the comm line.

Originally, Yan used only pushbutton handsets to provide the best signal strength (the more handsets online, the lower the signal strength). As you have pointed out, over thirty years of operators have failed to figure out the button. I am discouraged.

I have also proved that neodymium magnets in the tranceiver units greatly increase the signal strength! I have a Chinese company working on casting the exact shape of the original magnets in neodymium.

[cjb]

I was in the Navy as an interior communications electrician (sound powered phone tech) among other things. When I got out I thought 'at least I will never see another sound phone again!'. Then I went to work at a ski area. If you guys think the handsets are bad you should work on the head set variety, dont forget to add sea water into the mix! and a few bosun mates (much more abusive than the average lift operator).

[Emax]

Here's a cleaner solution to the pushbutton problem. Our operators seem to take better care of equipment that looks fresh.

After rebuild, I box the phones. A good bit of the mechanical damage to these things occurs during (rapid) snowmobile transport - especially the mouth cups ($18 each).

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[cjb]

One thing I have done is to get rid of the plugs on the phones and the receptacles at the operator stations. The reason those are standard on the phones is because in the Navy you brought a phone set or headset to many of the stations you were using them at and then when you were done with that evolution, (fire drill, refueling, whatever) you would take the phone set out. There were 4, 6 or 8 gang boxes of receptacles all over the ship, each hooked to a different circuit. For our lifts I just put a two terminal block where we needed them and connected the phone to that. Now to fix a phone there is usually no soldering involved and the phones last longer, because alot of failures are related to the neatness and quality of the previous repair, especially in the plugs. It is also very cheap as compared to the plugs and receptacles.