How to Take Apart a Payphone

by The Monk

Note:  I absolutely love Western Electric (WE), AT&T, C&P, NYNEX, BellSouth, and all of those wonderful organizations that are associated with the marvel of this century, the payphone.  I would never dream of actually doing anything in this article, and imagine no one else would.  I hate phreakers, and would turn all of them in the instant I thought I saw one.  I would turn in my own father if he were a phreaker.  God bless America, God bless AT&T, God bless WE, God bless C&P.  But, if someone does do anything contained in this article and gets caught, don't blame me.  Blame yourself.  Blame yourself for being such a f*cking idiot to pull the payphone, and to think that you would escape our wonderful police force.  I love my police force.  Snort... snort.

Three years of journalism and look hat happens to your brain.

Anyway, I wrote this article because I know there are some evil phreakers out there that would love to have a payphone, but don't have the slightest clue on how to take it apart.  No one really knows.  And if they do, it involves tools beyond most people, or time that most people don't find to be worth it.  With this method, you can take apart a payphone in less than 40 minutes after you get good at it.

You have a payphone.  You want the money, a DTMF pad, and enough electronics to open up an electronics store.  How do you do it?  The bare requirements of what you need: (this is assuming you are poor, and can't quite squeeze the expensive tools):

• 2 good quality flat-head screwdrivers.  One small, and one large.
• A pair of scissors.  The greater leverage, the better.
• A hex key tool set.  One key is needed, but the screws sometimes vary in size.
• A large pair of pliers.
• A hammer.

Now, if you have the money:

• A crowbar.
• A wedge/chisel.
• Large headed, small handle hammer.

And if you are the one of the lucky few:

• An air hammer (if you had one, you wouldn't be reading this though).

O.K., down to business.  First, you can do any of this while the phone is still attached to the wall, but I imagine that most first time people will not have the balls to do something like that.  That is understandable.  After you become familiar with how to do this though, you will probably want to do it while the phone is still attached to the wall, or booth.

Put the phone on its back.  Look right at it.  You should be staring at the front of the phone.  Now look at the silver facade of sorts on it.  Notice how cheap it is.  Notice how the push button amplifier seems to be barely attached on there?  Also notice how the two little "instruction" plastics are not held in by any screw, nor tape (you can wiggle the plastic).  You just made a major observation.  The places where the silver disappears and is holding the plastic in place I will now call a "window."  There are only two windows on a phone, the top and bottom window.

Now, take out your large screwdriver.  (At this point, I want to bring up a point that I take great pride in: quality of tools.  Get the best, your money can buy.  I purchase Craftsman tools only.  They will refund your money if your tool breaks for any reason whatsoever, no questions asked.  If you use a cheap Taiwan screwdriver for this part, you might end up with a broken screwdriver.  I make no promises about what your tools will look like after taking apart a payphone.)  Place the flat edge under the top area of the bottom window.  Now jam it in there as far as possible, to avoid breaking the tip of your screwdriver already, and then pry up.  Keep repeating this motion until the bottom-half of the silver plate is really starting to move up.  Then work on the side of the silver plate.  The top.  Don't worry about the amplifier button, it's just a button with a spring on it; the real amplifier is inside the payphone, nice and snug.

Also, you will have trouble with the armor for the wires to the handset, just finagle with it until you get slack in the silver metal that you need to pry the silver farther (if you run into, any trouble with the handset, you'll know what I'm talking about).  After the silver plate has come off, you should be staring at a totally black phone with a hole for the DTMF, and a DTMF pad in there.  Circuitry is exposed.  Good going, that was the second most difficult thing you were going to do tonight.

Now, take out the DTMF pad, whether by ripping it out, or with your small screwdriver, taking out the screws on the brackets that hold it in.  Warning:  if you decide to take out the DTMF by just unscrewing it, you may not notice the bracket screws, as the heads are facing a 90 degree angle from you.  The screws are on both sides of the DTMF, left and right.  Both are in the middle of the DTMF on the left and right sides of it.  Cut the wires to the DTMF.  I tried to keep the wires once, but it is way too much of a hassle.  Screw it, trust me on this, just take it out.  Rip it out, or just cut the wires.

Now, in the hole you should have two brackets.  You'll notice this thick plastic that keeps you from digging around inside of the payphone itself.  No problem.  That's where your heavy duty scissors come in handy.  But first, you will have to take your large screwdriver, and try to pry some of the plastic off first (you'll need a place to begin your cutting with the scissors).  You will want to cut out basically the whole bottom right-hand side of the plastic.  No problem really.  Should take you half an hour the first time, fifteen minutes after you get good with it.

Cutting the plastic is a very difficult step, and accomplishing it means that you are really committed to this.

Now take your pointer finger and feel inside of the hole near the right-hand side of the armor on the payphone.  Yes, you want to feel the back of the lock.  Now, you can shine a light in there also if you feel inclined to see what you are after.  It is a one and a half inch box by about one and a half inches.  It has four hex screws at each corner.  The lock is made of a very durable metal, and the screws cannot be shredded off.  Only one thing you can do, unscrew the screws.  They are all hex screws.  This is truly the hardest and most tedious part of the job.  You might have to bend some of the metal around the hole where the DTMF used to be.  Go ahead, it's your phone, do what you want.  There is nothing fragile attached to the armor at all.  Just don't sledgehammer the side of the armor, as the locking mechanism uses the side of the phone.  And if you lock/jam the mechanism, you're screwed.

You now have all four screws out.  Wiggle the lock a bit, and take out the, lock.  Take it all the way out of the phone - the lock gets in the way for the next step.

Now, with a small flat-head, move the screw on the left-hand side of the phone.  Yes, it just looks like a hole, but stick the flat-head in sideways and turn one quarter.  You should hear a definite "thunk" from the phone.  You just disabled the lock.  Congrats.  If you cannot move the screw, try moving the metal around where the lock used to be.  Slide it up or down.  It should move an inch, and make that "thunk" that we all love to hear.

I will now refer to the half of the phone with the plunger/handset - DTMF on it as the "top" half.  The "bottom" half is the other half of the phone.

Now take the front armor off of the phone.  Disconnect all wires that keep the front-half attached to the second-half of the phone.

At the top of the bottom-half you should see a piece of metal about the size of your thumb.  Move this.  It usually is a metal wire loop.  Move it up.  Did anything happen?  No?  Move it down.  When it moves more than an inch, leave it.  Now, with your large flat-head, there is a flat-head screw staring you in the eye.  Take this guy out.  It only takes a quarter to a half turn.  Now, remove the hardware contents of the phone.  The long skinny mechanism is the change sorter.  The circuit board attached to its bottom is the coin detector, to tell the phone what coin had just dropped through.  The thing at the bottom of the phone with copper wire wound around it is the servo mechanism.  Have you ever cut the yellow and black wires, waited around a day, reconnected them, and then got all of the money from that day back?  Well, this is the device you are manipulating.  The two system boards are just that, system boards.

If you only see a large box inside of clear plastic instead of a circuit board at the end of the change sorter, you have a pre-1980s payphone.  The device in clear plastic is the "red box."  Please, if you do figure out the electronics on this thing, let me know.  Typical piece of shit, no one can figure it out, and no one really wants to.  Just hike down to RadioTrash and buy a dialer if you want a Red Box this bad.  Yeesh.

Now, enough with that, time for the money.  While taking out the hardware, you should notice that there's a large piece of metal at the bottom of the phone that just would not move at all.  This is the entrance to the money bin.  Take a chisel and hammer and bang it off.  Now flip the phone upside down and stick your finger in the money hole and wiggle it.  Money should just pour out.

And with that, you should now get rid of all of the armor.  Throw it in a lake or a stream or such.  Keep the hardware as either trading material or whatever.

I know people who have attached the payphone to their lines and they say that a strange tone emanates from the phone, so they quickly disconnected it.  I would not recommend, for this reason, attaching the phone to your line, but I am not your mother either.

I have let this article evolve, and some questions have been brought up on COCOTS.  COCOTS are very easy to take apart, even easier than the WE phones.  They are less armored, and what armor they do have on them is very easy to take off.  What you want to do, if you get a COCOT, is follow my directions that are above.  But when you get up to the point of using a hex key to unscrew the lock, ignore that point and just take a screwdriver and a hammer, and bang on the back of the lock.  When you look at the lock, it should be cylindrical, and nothing should be able to stop you from banging it out.  Very cheap!  Then, just follow the rest of the directions, move the sliding bolt inside the phone, and then take the top half off.  Simple as pie.

In many COCOTS are two things, a master CPU board, that is run off of a Z80, and a 300 baud modem, also controlled by its own Z80.  It is quite interesting, EPROMs and the such.