Neither of the speakers look like they are from a phone...  I suspect they may have bought some of the plain Bell Boxes and dressed them up, although that doesn't explain the bells being flat to the wood, and the striker looks like it can't move anyway.

We need someone to take a sneaky look at the real thing and some good reference photos.  Ideally, a look inside too to see if it was based on a real phone, or made up from spares.

Well, it doesn't HAVE to actually be a phone

"how can you be ringing? You're not even a real phone!"  to quote Christopher Eccleston.

The body is clearly wooden, and quite simple
The bells from an alarm clock.
The ear piece, looking at it (and if you can find one that looks similat) a cut down salt shaker (as bad as that sounds)
The Mouth piece, erm how about an egg cup?

lol The ideas I come up with in my desperate attempts to recreate something ;P

This is what I've come up with so far myself; but it will change as it was based on the very top picture, and clearly the phone shown on screen is quite different....

For some reason, at that angle, the mouth piece looks
a bit Dalek'y... IMHO...

-Marc

If we can agree on some dimensions, I'll draft the phone blueprints up so we can recreate accurate copies.

Quote from: ramjet board=manual thread=851 post=16099 time=1219811229If we can agree on some dimensions

They're just relative.   

The picture's great, but the bells are nearer the top of the box, [the height at the top is only just bigger than the bells themselves].

There are two dials with a couple of inches between them 3/4 of the way down the box.

Looking at it, I think it's smaller than a sheet of A4 paper.. not that it helps a huge amount....   

Working on averages I've seen looking around the web, the boxes seem to be around six inches wide, and between 8-9 inches high.  Obviously that would be the rear panel, I'd imagine the front box to be 1 1/2 inches smaller heightwise, and 1/2 narrower than the rear panel.

It is just approximate figures, mind, and in old money...

The dimensions of this box, which looks a similar size and configuration are 6 5/8" wide x 9" high

hey thats pretty sweet phone you made, good job rox. what were you thinking of using for the mouth piece?

Quote from: atomicgraph board=manual thread=851 post=16117 time=1219867110hey thats pretty sweet phone you made, good job rox. what were you thinking of using for the mouth piece?

Mine's the dark one further up, not the one on the previous post... 

Bit of a bump on a long dormant thread, but the new TARDIS phone is almost certainly built off of a GPO 101 Telephone box and hardware. Looks like the bells have been replaced (originals were more smoothly hemispherical and a bit larger) and the transmitter and receiver replaced with dummies.

The case has lots of details (fastenings and plates on the hook side and hinges on the other side, to say nothing of the moulded edge detail very typical of these boxes) they wouldn't bother putting in for a mere repro prop and is basically a No. 1 Bell Set type case that was used at this full size only on a few different phone apparatus - a couple of Bell Sets, the No. 101 local exchange type telephone (without dial), and the No. 121 automatic exchange type (with dial). The Bell Sets lack the hook and some of the other hardware visible in a couple of the screen grabs of the hook side of the prop, and the No. 121 telephone would have left a big hole in the bottom half of the front cover where the dial would have been - that leaves the No. 101.

Don't have any idea what those two knobs are. Likely they were just "nurnies" put on by the prop department when they added the fake receiver and transmitter, but if they are original to the box they used as a base, then it is possible that this was a local exchange phone that was modified to be an intercom at some point and those are buttons to switch to other lines.

Here are a few pics of a GPO 101 (noting that on the front shot the transmitter looks huge because of the use of a wide angle lens):







The dimensions given for a No. 1 Bell Set box by a seller (which should be identical to the GPO 101 and 121) was 243mm tall by 170mm wide. Note also that these were made out of Mahogany in the UK and the grain on the front runs left to right (unlike in the US where they were typically either Oak or Walnut with the grain running top to bottom, as well as looking a bit different even when you can find one with the same general layout - which is rare).

EDIT: Before anybody points it out - the hinges on the above pics have a bit different spacing than that on the prop. From what I've seen on a few different samples both spacing and the length of the hinges are points of variability over time on these instruments so it's not surprising that this is the case.

I found the following website for wooden phones. http://www.collectorsweekly.com/telephones/wood
They had a listing for a Western Electrice complete wiht bells at: http://www.ebay.com/itm/360397069398 this is the closest I have been able to find to Chripins picture. Not a bad deal.

I've been looking into making a scale model of the phone, so I was grateful to find this thread.
I do have one observation.  I'm struck by the two buttons on the phone (see the photo attached to  mordrogyn's earlier post).  I did some searching and found the phone pictured in my attachment (with permission of the Antiques dealer who sold it on ebay)
This is a Deveau 1899 Hotel-Switchboard Phone - hence the buttons on the face (and no dial) - I think we're agreed that the TARDIS phone is not completely historically accurate  for example, the curly cord which is not from the same era as the phone. So, the original body of the phone could be a switchboard type phone (I don't know exactly which one).
And, it makes sense that it would be the actual body of an antique phone (found at the local thriftshop?), since, if they'd gone through the trouble of building a phone body from scratch, they probably would not have put the buttons on it.
If this is an observation someone else has already made, my apologies for the misuse of bandwidth
I'll continue looking for a possible candidate, and will post again if I have any luck.