General Electric cordless phone

No entry last week because I just flat ran out of time.

Somewhere between last Saturday and today was the first anniversary of me keeping records of my junk disassembly hobby. So, I figured I'd use the occasion to post about a phone I took apart several years ago. This was the first time I had attempted to document the taking apart process, from complete appliance to pile of parts.



This is from November 2004, about a month before I moved to Hawaii, hence all the boxes and stuff in the background. If I remember correctly, I had set the table up to sort out erector set parts for sale, then realized I had a broken phone, and decided to take it apart.



I didn't think/bother to document the process, so the documentation sort of skips to an end shot of all the parts. For some reason, I didn't separate the parts I kept with the ones I trashed. If I remember correctly, I kept the housing of the cradle, the cradle's antenna, and possibly the receiver housing. It's been a while, and not all of my junk is in the same place. Also, it seems like my photography skills have not really improved in 4 years.



As I was taking the phone apart, I decided the cradle housing looked sort of vehicular, so I got out my collection of broken toy parts to mock up a dune buggy/ATV type configuration. The white thing on top is a piece of cardboard, and the two (well one and a half, anyway) action figures were there to try to work out the best scale.



I made a crude mock-up in MS Paint to show where I wanted the wheels (black rectangles) and engine (grey rectangle). Unfortunately, the project has yet to move past the vague design stage. I should still have all the parts, so I may get back to it once I move to an apartment that's a bit more conducive to hobby work..

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.