telephone, manufacturer unknown

This is another junk appliance liberated from Grandma's trash. This particular piece is remarkable (I think so, anyway) in how unremarkable it is. It's definitely one of the most generic devices I've seen in a while.

It's a phone, a black phone. That's pretty much all I could determine about it. If I had to guess, I'd say it's from the early 90s, before cordless became the standard. Presumably, the manufacturer's name was on the cradle, which we never did find.

It took a lot of effort to get to the guts. I got one screw out, the only one I could find, but the case still wouldn't budge. I couldn't get a screwdriver tip under it either. Once again, when hand tools fail, you have to use the floor. I grabbed the phone by the cord and swung it like a flail at the concrete floor. It took about five minutes of smashing before the case split, at which point I noticed two cracked posts with screws in them.

Sure enough, I peeled off a little sticker above the keypad, and there were two screws, staring back like little mocking eyes. Hiding fasteners behind stickers or stick-on rubber feet is an old trick, and I usually catch it. Not this time, I guess.

There's not much worth saving out of a phone like this. I pretty much just took the buttons.

Westclox Big Ben alarm clock

While I was home over the holidays, one of the things I did was help my mom and uncle sort out and pack up my grandma's stuff, since she's moving in with my uncle. It was a big job, since Grandma's sort of a packrat (so I guess I come by it honestly). I think we ended up finding about four clocks and at least three phones, not counting the ones actively in use. One of the clocks and two of the phones turned out to be broken, and I was there to intercept them on the way to the trashcan.

It's been probably close to ten years since I took an analog clock apart, and I don't think I've ever scrapped a wind-up clock. I guess part of that is because the vast majority of alarm clocks now are digital, and I never see wall clocks in the trash for whatever reason.

This particular clock had glow-in-the-dark hands and numbers, and it's old enough that there was a small but nonzero chance of them containing radium, so I didn't save them.

The face of the clock was just a piece of paperboard, so it came out fairly easily. Without the face, it sort of just looks like a little bucket of parts.

Here's the mechanism pried open. A lot of the parts didn't want to come out, but enough of them did that it wasn't a completely futile endeavour.

Not a bad trophy pile, though it might have looked more impressive if I had photographed the parts on a darker background.

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Housekeeping note: I'm thinking of going to only posting once a week, on Saturdays. That way, I have more of a buffer in the event that I don't find any new stuff for a while. But I haven't decided for sure yet. If I don't post on Wednesday, then I've gone to a weekly post schedule. Also, I'm still in the process of fixing the formatting, but it's boring work, so it might take a while to complete.