Old Hacks: The Phone

When I was cleaning my overly-messy apartment and discarding old stuff I found my old telephone. It had originally been a fax machine. The old kind with a big roll of thermal paper, not the newer plain-paper kind. My mother got it free or cheap from the place she worked when they upgraded and brought it home. After a lightning storm the fax/copy function no longer worked.

I took some tools to the non-faxing fax machine. Most of the space it took up was to hold the roll of thermal paper and the printing mechanism, both of which no longer served any purpose. Most of the electronics were in reasonably self-contained pieces. The control panel with the keypad was even its own panel mounted on the plastic case. I extracted the pieces I needed, fastened them together, and had myself a slightly large, but not unreasonably so, telephone.

I condemned it to electronics recycling since I haven’t had a land line in some years, but first I took a few photos for history (click below to embiggen). There are two metal enclosures full of electronics, which I bolted together with some hardware from the discarded case plus a little duct tape. Same for the handset cradle, taken off the case and screwed in to vent holes on one of the enclosures. The front panel happened to be a convenient size, and a little duct tape on the top and bottom attached it to the two electrical enclosures.