Cianer.com

A previous company were chucking out an old Northern Telecom wall-mounted rotary telephone so I brought it home and stuck it in my games room.  The idea was that I would hear the phone ringing when the volume on the XBox360 was cranked up to ninety (as it invariably was when I was home alone and my wife was trying to ring), as the phone has an old-fashioned bell ringer.

The only slight fly in the ointment was that this vintage phone didn't ring.

I could dial-out ok and could talk ok but it wouldn't ring. I figured the telephone was probably broken, but it turns out to have been an easy fix. Reading a classicrotaryphones.com article he says that for his telephone "Black goes to “K” and the red wire goes to “L1″. Examining my phone the red wire went to "A" which appeared to be the equivalent of his "K" and the black wire went to "L2". The red and black wires being reversed is irrelevant since the ringer works on an alternating signal, but I assumed that L2 would be equivalent to L1 as the incoming ring signal is also AC. Wrong! Looking at the diagram below

(schematic obtained from atcaonline.com) shows that from the ringer's perspective there is a huge difference between L1 and L2.  I moved the contact over and hey presto!

I can now hear the phone ringing over the sound of Left4Dead, which means I can be distracted from playing it.  He shoots..................he hits himself in the foot.