This is my main hobby--collecting and restoring vintage phones, mostly phones from the late 1890s to the 1980s.

It's a pretty serious hobby. I have probably 200 phones total, maybe 100 restored, some of which are worth more than my truck!

Here's a little sample of what I have. If anyone's interested, I can post some more!

 

I have a couple pics that would interest you,that I took on my winter road trip.Here is a display at the Henry Ford Museum of antique phones.
Sometimes my camera takes grainy pics indoors.It happened to both of these.







That top one you have there is really cool! Do you restore those yourself? That looks incredibly well done.Like a paint job on a car or truck, in that it's all in the prep work I suppose, that leads to the high quality success?

 

I actually went to The Henry Ford museum shortly before I started phone collecting. I definitely need to go back there to see the phones this time! I see some phones in those pictures that quite a few collectors would kill to have...

Thanks! Yep, I restore all of mine. I usually find them covered in mold, scratches, paint, etc, and bring them back to factory condition. Most of them simply need to be polished before they look good, others require a lot more!

The top one is one of my more recent projects. It's a push button payphone built in 1966, before # and * buttons were used (known to collectors as ten button phones). Only a handful of examples of this model are left in existence, and this is the only one that I know about that has been fully restored. I found two of them at a flea market for $15 each, and they're valued at around $1500-$3000 each!

This one was powdercoated in color-matching powder. I can't take credit for the finish, my dad sprayed the powder (and did an excellent job at that), but I did just about everything else. I still need to find a 1966 handset (receiver) for it, and I added a correct chrome door to the bottom after the picture was taken, but almost everything else is there. I also need to begin getting ready to restore its twin...

This is what it looked like before, on the left. I had to find a donor payphone with the correct base and backboard. Fortunately, all of the rare parts were already in the upper housings I bought. These upper housings were interchangeable with the more common rotary payphones at the time, so I just had to look for a beaten-up rotary payphone!

 

Nice to have a dial phone around just to mess with the youngins, they don't know how to operate one. Ha! They were pretty stout I remember that. I've been looking for a wall hanger for the garage.

 

I've heard stories of kids trying to stick their fingers in the holes to try dialing a number! I'm 18 now, and know far more about phones than any of my friends. Not that they really care...

Try searching 'rotary wall phone' or 'vintage wall phone' on eBay, you'll be surprised how cheap some of them are!

If you have a VOIP landline system, you probably won't be able to use a rotary phone. VOIP systems are designed specifically to work off tones that push button phones use to dial, whereas rotary phones use pulses.

If you want to use it, you should buy a Pulse-to-Tone converter that translates the pulses to tones that the system recognizes. If it's just for display, then, carry on...