A couple years ago I dabbled with buying old and tired Western Electric rotary dial telephones on eBay. You know, the kind of phone that people over 40 remember from their youth. I learned a bit about the phones, cleaned them up and made them work, and resold them on eBay. It was fun for a while, but then I got bored and moved on to other things.

For some reason one day last week I decided to try my hand at buying a couple more phones from eBay. The photo you see is one of those phones. I cleaned it, shined it, and made it work with the help of phone guru Dennis Markham over at Vintage Rotary Phones. After a bit of struggling with the correct wire configuration, the darn thing works again, just like it has for over forty years!

I listed the phone for sale on eBay. Feel free to buy it before someone else steals it out from under your nose.

January 6th, 2007 | One Photo a Day