Well, I though I snapped up a nice W28 for a nice price on marktplaats (Dutch ad site), but it turns out to be a piece of trash. Oh well, I took a gamble….
That is the risc of buying on the internet: you’re never sure of what you are buying exactly and the state which it is in.
In the pictures in the advert, the phone looked okay: paint looked alright, nice shine, promising old style handset, cloth cords. I did notice strange white stuff on the handset.
But hey, how could it go wrong? I have a lot of spare parts for this model and it is made of metal, so not easily damaged.
Well, when it arrived the phone turned out to be repainted in a horrible maner. Even the bakelite parts were covered in thick black paint. The white stuff on the handset turned out to be primir coming through the upper layer of chipped black paint. It will be quite a lot of work to get it right again. The question is, is it worth all that trouble?
And yet, it is a rather unusual telephone. The lay out of the electrical components is quite different from the regular W28s. I have a similar phone. The badly painted one is made by Heemaf, with the small metal plate with Heemaf logo hardly showing through the thick paint. The one I already have by Siemens and Halske in 1930 for the Amsterdam city telephone company (Gemeentelijke telefoondienst Amsterdam).
Unfortunately the new arrival lacks its diagram on the base plate and any other form of dating information, apart from a date code for 1930 inside the handset.
Heemaf started producing phones in 1931, the Heemaf type 1931. Further study is needed and this phone may yet be worht while restoring.
Leave a Reply