Metal 'Orse sounds like a sweet rock band name!
Like a 3 piece with wood axle and metal halves, glued together with Loctite?
Posting this from my Mum’s house where this is on the wall
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The Dead 'Orse is an Amazing Yoyo.
I am Curious about an Iron 'Orse! Could be a challenge… may require pads?
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My parents house has/had the same thing! It was always super useful during blackouts because it didn’t require power like the wireless phones did with their base unit. Still functions!
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Contract a shop with a Swiss lathe. Have them turn a rod to a specified axle diameter and then thread both ends at a smaller diameter. Use the shoulders where the threads meet the middle to set your gap.
You’ll need to see what they might charge for a whole bunch of them because a small quantity won’t be cheap. I could cut the things pretty easy as a prototype kind of thing, but it would NOT be cost effective for production because I wouldn’t be able to run them quickly enough.
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THIS…. Is a very cool old telephone. As a career telephone man I am interested in all things telephone related.
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Is it functional? Even if it takes calls in, I don’t see how you’d dial out
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We also had a 20ft springy cord on ours to talk around the house lol
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there is no greater demonstration of the universe’s movement from order to entropy and chaos than those phone cords
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AFAIK still fully functional, but not connected to anything. It worked fine before becoming obsolete and eventually being restored.
During floods this could somehow connect to the other two farmhouses on the same ridge in some kind of open system, no cranks just pick up and talk. I’ve only seen it used connected to model rail signalling circuits.
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These old phones you cranked a handle and this rang the operator. You told the operator where you needed connected and they connected you. 
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Well I know that much, I’m just curious how it would operate today without the ability to specify a dial-out
You could get dial tone on it but that’s about all. The systems to operate that sort of phone were removed decades ago. 
That’s what I kinda figured. I’m assuming it could receive calls, though?
You could actually receive calls and talk on it. I also imagine the ringer was quite effective. 
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I imagine it could be hooked up to a dedicated line. More or less a very fancy two cans connected by wire situation
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The building I work in has a hilarious patchwork of legacy tech, this probably would have received calls up until about a year ago.
Federal government is disabling all networks that can’t guarantee access to emergency service numbers.
But yeah, in a private network (eg model railroad) it’s still good. And I know a few people who have them in their shed/workshop hooked up to the front doorbell.
When this eventually hangs on my wall I’ll be taking advantage of the huge amount of real estate inside to house a router, hard drive and power distribution hub alongside the original hardware
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Be pretty dope to set it up with PBX (or a more lightweight alternative). Idk if it’s doable or if you can keep the internals original, but I can only imagine having friends over and seeing their faces when that phone rings. Especially the ones that do know that I’d be pretty weird for it to do that.
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I never considered adding on to the original hardware. Maybe a wifi switch that could connect to my android home automation setup, wired up to the ringer.
My router and HD are solely for UPnP media share and wouldn’t physically connect to anything, just make use of the space inside.
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