Author Topic: Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use  (Read 9339 times)

Offline black85vette

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Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use
« on: October 12, 2014, 03:36:43 PM »
Not sure if this if of any interest or not so I will make a short post and if there is any interest I will post more or answer questions.   

I got a free single slot, touch tone pay phone from my company when they decided to remove them from service.  They are no longer needed with the number of cell phones being carried.  The controller board is fairly complicated and there is not much info about them, so I decided to remove the insides and replace it with the guts from two 2500 standard analog desk phones.   The older desk phone had the two bell mechanical ringer and the newer one was all electronic on a single circuit board.   I used just the transformer and bell from the older one and wired the keypad and handset from the pay phone into the newer circuit board.  Fortunately the keypads are fairly standard 7 wire hookup.   It was just a matter of identifying the  3 column and 4 row wires on both the pay phone and desk set and then just connecting the pay phone key pad up.   Hand set was done the same.   Just figure out the ear and mouth piece connections and hook them up.  The switch hook on the payphone is a simple reed switch SPST normally open so I connected the green (L2) wire from the phone line to the green wire on the circuit board and then connected the red (L1) wire through the switch hook.   

On the coin mechanism I put in a screw to keep the coin gate set to always send the coin to the coin box and not the return slot.  Pretty simple to do in only a couple of hours.   Now have a pay phone sitting on my work bench that works perfectly with an old school dual bell mechanical ringer in it.   Total project cost was under $10 for the phone cord to plug into the wall.   No external power needed.

You can drop coins into the coin box, so I guess it will be my piggy bank.   Also have the keys to it so I can get the coins out.


Offline Joules

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Re: Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use
« Reply #1 on: October 12, 2014, 03:55:39 PM »
Nice, I could have done with one of those when the kids still lived at home.
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Offline John Rudd

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Re: Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use
« Reply #2 on: October 12, 2014, 04:10:16 PM »
 :worthless:
Nice, I could have done with one of those when the kids still lived at home.

Couldnt we alll....
I remember when we had a rotary dial phone ( loop disconnect dialling) my folks had a lock on the dial ....but you could tap out the number using the switch actuators on the top of the phone....remember Dial a disc? In the 70's?
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Offline awemawson

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Re: Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use
« Reply #3 on: October 12, 2014, 04:48:32 PM »
Pre STD (that's Subscriber Trunk Dialling not sexually transmitted diseases !) you could tap out a number in a call box from one exchange area then on to the next if you had the codes, but doing it that way no additional amplification was switched in so the call got progressively quieter the further that you went. When my older brother was at university he could call home from Oxford to Bedford for free, but we could hardly hear him  :lol:
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Offline hanover fist

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Re: Converting coin pay phone to coinless for home use
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2015, 02:08:56 PM »
Is there a way to mod it so a coin works, but it just falls through?