A Typical Bakelite Restoration

I take great pride in the production of a quality restoration of these old phones. I have spent anything up to 6 hours producing an acceptable finish to a 2 or 300 type telephone which sounds like a lot but cleaning up 70 years of dirt corrosion and wear isn't a quick job.

Any replacement parts, if required are genuine new old stock or original spares. On the odd occasion I have to use a repro handset cord as these are very hard to find as unissued old stock.

I've bought a few phones where the description has been "genuine", "original" etc only to find when opened up that it's almost all made up of repro parts and it ends up in the bin and the original bits in my stock of spares.

Always a good place to start! A close look at all the parts to check for a good item and note any parts that are damaged or not supposed to be there such as little bells in a 200 and random bits of new wire, repro parts, hairline cracks and chips. Hopefully everything is as it should be. With all the main bits separated I start off with the body and give it a clean to see any imperfections that may be present, light scratches can normally be polished out without breeching the bakelite surface and exposing the filler below, deeper ones mean it gets put to one side and a replacement used for the rebuild if a perfect finished item is what's needed. This goes for cracks and heavy abrasions too. If the damage is not too detrimental to the look or operation of the phone, it gets reused but has to be described as less than perfect.