"Irene" wrote in message
...
Frank, what does it mean if the old phone had been rented from the phone
company? How would a formerly rented phone affect a conversion to a push
button phone using the same wiring?


As far as I know the phone companies universally abandoned all rental phones
years ago.

A wall phone of your vintage probably has a modular connector. This makes
things easy if it does. Hold the bottom of the phone and slide it up. If
it slide up about an eighth of an inch the phone should pull straight off
the wall. there will be a standard modular jack on the plate you can plug
in the regular phone into.

If the phone is the older type, without the modular jack, the cover of the
phone comes off (Some sort of catch on the bottom of the phone.) and you
will see where a cable with 4 wires has two of these wires attached to screw
terminals. (Usually a red and a green, the other two are not used.) There
will be a mounting screw or two near the bottom that you remove and then the
phone will slide up and off.

To install a modular jack to the old wire, hook the red and the green wire
from your cable to the red and green wire in the jack and the new phone
should work. If you have a dial tone but pushing the buttons on the phone
does not make tones, reverse the connections and that should fix the
problem.

--

Roger Shoaf

About the time I had mastered getting the toothpaste back in the tube, then
they come up with this striped stuff.