Does anyone know anything about Trimphones?

[electron800]

Last weekend I was rummaging round in my Grandad's loft and found a beautiful 1970's avacado green trimphone. It had the old GPO connector which had to be hardwired. I opened it up and replaced this with a modern plug and socket cable, with the help of wiring instructions I found on the internet.

It dials out and you can answer calls from it, but I have 2 problems. Firstly, the ringer won't ring. I know it must still work, as I wired it up wrong at first and it just made a constant high pitched squeal, but nothing I do seems to make it ring. Secondly, when dialing out it causes the other phone (a touch tone type) to beep each time a number is dialed. This only happens on the higher end numbers like 8,9, and 0, but not as much on 1 or 2 for example.

Any help would be apprieciated

I cannot get a pic of it right now, but it looks just like this

 

[rp2813]

Nice phone. I'm not familiar with differences between European and U.S. phones but I'm sure it's a very simple thing to start the ringing for incoming calls and end the "ringback" when dialing. There are vintage phone sites that probably have a solution for you.

 

[oldhouseman]

I have a

telephone made in Germany in 1944 that had the same issues. I had a friend that knows a good bit about telephones look mine over. It works perfectly since he tinkered with it. I will give him a call tomorrow and find out what he has to report about it.

Greg/Oldhouseman

 

[MrX]

British Telecom wiring is a little strange by international standards, as it continues to use third wire ringing. There's a capacitor in the master socket that seperates out the AC ringing voltage applied ot the line and sends it down a 3rd wire.

Ireland's wiring pretty much follows US/Canadian standards for telephones.

Your Trim Phone should have 3 wires?

I'm not sure what colours to match up to on the plug

folliw these and you should sort it out :

Wiring Information - Telephones UK

www.telephonesuk.co.uk

Wiring Information - Telephones UK

www.telephonesuk.co.uk

 

[electron800]

That website just confuses me

firstly, the phone has 4 wires, the "bell" wire, the earth and the A and B wires, as stated in the website above. The cable I am using is actually a modem extension cable with the modem end cut off and wired into the phone. This has strange coloured wires though. They are red green yellow and black. According to the instructions, in a standard cable, green should be the earth, but I can only get a dial tone by attatching the green cable where the white should go in a standard BT cable. The red goes where it should and im not really sure about the black and yellow. I'm using yellow as earth and black as the bell cable at the moment but that isn't working and they dont work the other way round either.

 

[MrX]

Easiest way to do it is by trial and error.

Get a straight BT cable and connect the other end to a junction box, you can get these in Maplins.

Then just try all combinations of the connections there aren't that many really!

 

[seamusuk]

Dont use a modem cable!!!!!

They are cross wired and wont work(although they work fine on my US Bell System 500 set!

Will take a pic of the internals and connections of my Trimphone tomoz

Seamus