Jane's attic update No LI: an antique wall crank telephone.

Now that the attic is as good as finished, I find great pleasure in adding extra's to it, be it a box, a book, or a portrait. Even when some of these items are quite small and 'humble', each of them enhances the attic's overall appearance.

Going through my miniatures stash, I came across a nice, antique wall crank telephone which I thought would look great in the attic, even though it was in desperate need of some old-fashioned 'weathering'. After completion, it came to look like this:

But that's not how it initially looked like! The below image shows the same phone before the make-over.

As you can see, it looked way too pristine for the attic! So... I decided to get my hands on it, and make it look more like the early 1900's telephone it was supposed to represent!

For starters, I needed to get rid of that awful plastic cord, which resembled a garden hose, rather than a phone cord. Above is the 'hose' next to its replacement, a more realistic cord.

The ear piece needed some attention too. Some research work helped me figure out how a real ear piece would look like, so I tried to do something similar with this one. The result can be seen in the below images.

Then some work was done to the mouth piece as well. I didn't drill any holes in it because the piece is so small that I feared of destroying it completely, even using the smallest of drills. I did, however, weather the metal part, to make it look like corroded brass.

Finally, I gave the crank some attention. In the old days, many rural areas required the use of a magneto crank and internal battery to generate the current needed to use the phone, until the introduction of electricity made these unnecessary. Yet this type of telephone remained in use for many decades.

I must say I'm very pleased with the final result, so the old crank telephone is now ready to be attached to the wall!

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