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Inside The Secret Underground Laboratory
- Thread starter Bruce Johnson
- Start date
When I was a kid, my grandparents still had the old black Bakelite ones from the 40’s, you could clock somebody with the handset alone. Come to think of it, everything they owned was from the 40’s, all those old American iron appliances lasted forever. The bell had that old timey jangle all the old farts (me) have as their iPhone ringtone, cause in my mind, that’s what a phone is supposed to sound like.
Looks like that telephone could use a bit of retro-brighting to bring it back to looking like new: How to Clean & Whiten Yellowed Plastics | RetroFixes
I have a few old phones around here, but because the system has converted to digital, I don't think they work, and there may not be enough current supplied to ring the bells.
I have a friend in Spokane that steadfastly refuses to upgrade his home phone system, and still has all old telephones in his house.
I have a friend in Spokane that steadfastly refuses to upgrade his home phone system, and still has all old telephones in his house.
I work in telecom, though not on the consumer side anymore, so I might as well continue this derail.
The telco system in general has a requirement (or they did when I was working within it many years ago) to support older telephones, so they have to support rotary dial and ring voltage - those two things are very different in an analog world than a digital one. The in-between step is DTMF (the audible digits you used to hear when you pushed buttons - it stands for Dual Tone, Multi-Frequency), DTMF uses a different system than rotary dial. On a rotary dial the telco switch is essentially counting clicks in the completed/uncompleted circuit, in the old days the "clicks" would spin a relay at the telco center (that was before my time!). On DTMF systems the switch is listening for tones to indicate numbers. In both DTMF and rotary there is a constant 48v on one side and ground on the other, telephones basically complete the circuit to get dialtone (it's aptly named a "loop start" circuit) any analog circuit in your house is loop start, commercial enterprises have other kinds of circuits. The voltage that causes a phone to ring hurts if you happen to be touching the wires when someone is calling. I worked on a wiring frame where that happened way too often.
In the digital environment we are in today all call control info (digits, hanging up, ringing) is handled via a digital data stream that is independent from the audio stream, your audio stream is quantized and sent as a sequence of ones and zeros.
Way too much info, I know.
The telco system in general has a requirement (or they did when I was working within it many years ago) to support older telephones, so they have to support rotary dial and ring voltage - those two things are very different in an analog world than a digital one. The in-between step is DTMF (the audible digits you used to hear when you pushed buttons - it stands for Dual Tone, Multi-Frequency), DTMF uses a different system than rotary dial. On a rotary dial the telco switch is essentially counting clicks in the completed/uncompleted circuit, in the old days the "clicks" would spin a relay at the telco center (that was before my time!). On DTMF systems the switch is listening for tones to indicate numbers. In both DTMF and rotary there is a constant 48v on one side and ground on the other, telephones basically complete the circuit to get dialtone (it's aptly named a "loop start" circuit) any analog circuit in your house is loop start, commercial enterprises have other kinds of circuits. The voltage that causes a phone to ring hurts if you happen to be touching the wires when someone is calling. I worked on a wiring frame where that happened way too often.
In the digital environment we are in today all call control info (digits, hanging up, ringing) is handled via a digital data stream that is independent from the audio stream, your audio stream is quantized and sent as a sequence of ones and zeros.
Way too much info, I know.
Good info, thanks! I wasn't planning on hooking it into any real phone system. There are miles of old telecom cables running around this building, but I don't think any of them are hooked up or operational. We have two ATT DSL lines coming in, and the techs went nuts trying to figure out the rat's nest of wiring at the inlet panels.
My thinking is to connect up two of these old rotary phones as an independent wired intercom. About 100' distance. Some kind of a power supply. I don't really need the dials to work. Ideally, you pick up the handset of one and the other rings. Pick up the other and they are connected, two-way. Or something like that.
Someone must have done this before, and I can't imagine that it's too complicated. Can you point me in the direction of instructions on how to wire old phones like this?
Thanks!
That's called a ring down circuit, pick up one phone and the other one rings. Among other uses, those are used in stock trading through a device called a turret. I've done those before, the box has to generate both ring voltage and the 48v to run the phones. I did a quick search and it looks like this box will do it: Viking Electronics Two-Way Phone Line Simulator with Dial Tone
When we converted one of our trading customers over to the digital equivalent of this they complained that the phone was too slow to ring - it took the switch literally 100ms to convert the off hook on one end to a ring on the other end, whereas the analog equivalent was instantaneous. The broker could hear a 100ms delay in a ringback tone in their ear. The broker's contention was that the 100ms would cost him money if the price of whatever he was buying/selling dropped before his order went in. We swapped them back to analog.
Incidentally there is a variant of this called a "junkyard" or "shout down" circuit where it's a wide open network and someone pushed a button and shouted into a microphone on one end and it comes out on the speaker in all the other locations. It was used in the old days of junkyards where someone needed a part for a customer and they would yell to see if any other junkyards in the area had the part - an early version of Google, I guess :-D.
When we converted one of our trading customers over to the digital equivalent of this they complained that the phone was too slow to ring - it took the switch literally 100ms to convert the off hook on one end to a ring on the other end, whereas the analog equivalent was instantaneous. The broker could hear a 100ms delay in a ringback tone in their ear. The broker's contention was that the 100ms would cost him money if the price of whatever he was buying/selling dropped before his order went in. We swapped them back to analog.
Incidentally there is a variant of this called a "junkyard" or "shout down" circuit where it's a wide open network and someone pushed a button and shouted into a microphone on one end and it comes out on the speaker in all the other locations. It was used in the old days of junkyards where someone needed a part for a customer and they would yell to see if any other junkyards in the area had the part - an early version of Google, I guess :-D.
Thanks, Jisch!
I started doing a little digging, and there's a wealth of info out there. As to be expected, there's a whole cult of people who collect old rotary phones and rig them up into intercoms and all kinds of things. It looks like it's real easy to connect the phones together and make them talk to each other. The ring circuit is a little more complicated, requiring an unusual power supply and some relays. But not a big deal. I'll figure it out.
This forum is unbelievable with regard to who knows what and what kinds of questions can get answered, and what kinds of information is available... Love it! Nice work @Jisch
Yes, we folks who build basses come from all kinds of interesting backgrounds. I've met many knowledgeable and fascinating characters in this world of Luthiers. It's a club of magicians in many ways. We've arrived at this craft from different directions. Some of the "secret" knowledge we've invented ourselves; other tricks have been passed down from our elders.
I have an almost identical green phone that I rescued from where I worked. They put in a new system and all the old green and even older black Bakelite phones were junked. I wish I had picked up half a dozen of each!
One more note about phones, and then we'll move on:
If I remember correctly, the bland green rotary phones were standard issue on military bases, particularly Army facilities. And I think I remember seeing mostly blue-grey phones on Navy bases. Maybe some of you military guys can correct me.
Inside the classified areas at Lockheed (in the 1980's), most of us had two corded pushbutton phones on our desks. One was the Classified phone. They were either tan or red and had a special row of buttons at the bottom. They were on a complicated network that connected to other classified locations around the world. You couldn't just dial out any number. It was heavily encrypted, and you could discuss TS/SCI level information. The communication was very distorted, sounding like something from a sci-fi movie. It was hard to recognize the person you were talking to by their voice, it was that distorted.
The other phone was black, and was called the Hello Phone. It was a normal phone, connected out onto the normal phone network. Except, from what I was told, the phone lines that they were connected to were being continuously changed and rotated every few hours. So, it would be difficult for enemy spies to trace the location or listen in. The Hello Phones were unclassified only. We were strictly prohibited from discussing anything classified on them. You weren't even supposed to mention your last name. Discussions had to be generic with no technical details. We used that phone to call other people around Lockheed, non-classified suppliers, etc. No personal calls allowed. They were called Hello Phones because if it rang, you picked it up and just said Hello? Never give your name until you knew who you were talking to, and then only first names.
The crazy black world business.
If I remember correctly, the bland green rotary phones were standard issue on military bases, particularly Army facilities. And I think I remember seeing mostly blue-grey phones on Navy bases. Maybe some of you military guys can correct me.
Inside the classified areas at Lockheed (in the 1980's), most of us had two corded pushbutton phones on our desks. One was the Classified phone. They were either tan or red and had a special row of buttons at the bottom. They were on a complicated network that connected to other classified locations around the world. You couldn't just dial out any number. It was heavily encrypted, and you could discuss TS/SCI level information. The communication was very distorted, sounding like something from a sci-fi movie. It was hard to recognize the person you were talking to by their voice, it was that distorted.
The other phone was black, and was called the Hello Phone. It was a normal phone, connected out onto the normal phone network. Except, from what I was told, the phone lines that they were connected to were being continuously changed and rotated every few hours. So, it would be difficult for enemy spies to trace the location or listen in. The Hello Phones were unclassified only. We were strictly prohibited from discussing anything classified on them. You weren't even supposed to mention your last name. Discussions had to be generic with no technical details. We used that phone to call other people around Lockheed, non-classified suppliers, etc. No personal calls allowed. They were called Hello Phones because if it rang, you picked it up and just said Hello? Never give your name until you knew who you were talking to, and then only first names.
The crazy black world business.
Over on the Love Of Ampegs thread, Rick was asking some questions about how I found this building, and the story of moving my whole operation here. How the Secret Underground Laboratory began.
If you want to read back, the story of my move was happening real time near the end of Part 1 of the Love Of Ampegs thread, page 47, post #925. And a series of posts after that, to the end of Part 1. Thanks, Rich, for digging that out! I'll copy some of those posts here on this thread, below, to tie in the story here.
That was almost exactly 5 years ago. Hard to believe. In August 2013 I found this building and closed the deal on leasing space here. I started moving in September, bringing loads up. I continued doing some instrument work out of the Burbank shop through the end of November. Most of the main machines came up in December, and my first night in here in the building was Christmas Eve 2013. In a sleeping bag on the floor, surrounded by my machines. I resumed limited operations here in January 2014, and finally cleared the last debris out of the Burbank shop at the end of January.
The move took from September through the end of January. 45 miles each way, a total of 54 truck loads, about 32 tons. And believe it or not, I did it all by myself. All of the packing, loading, driving, unloading. The only real physical help I had was Keith (who I'd just met), on the load bringing up my biggest lathe. He helped me unload it and roll it around.
About 25 of the truckloads were with my old pickup, bring up smaller stuff. The other loads were with various rented trucks. I used the U-Haul box trucks by themselves, and towing different trailers. The biggest machines came up on a hydraulic lift trailer that lowers down flat to the ground, towed by a U-Haul truck. I also did six loads with a Ryder stake-bed truck with a lift gate. An enormous amount of work. And I sure hope I never have to move again.
How I found this building (or how it found me?) is surprisingly simple: CraigsList.
In the summer of 2013, I knew I had to move out of Burbank. As hard as I was struggling, I was falling behind on my rent. My landlord there was a great guy, very understanding. But his expenses were going up and he was going to have to raise the rent. I was no longer doing any work at Disney, down the street. And I wasn't making enough building instruments to cover it. It was obvious that I simply couldn't afford to stay there. No longer any real reason to stay. Burbank has become so insanely crowded with people and traffic, that I couldn't stand it any more. Time to get out of the big city. From now on, I was going to be a full time Luthier. No more rent money from other side work. I needed to find a cheaper, quieter place to run my business.
I was originally thinking of going to Bakersfield. As a grubby small industrial city, it appealed to me. I drove up to Bakersfield several times that summer, scouting around and looking at a few small buildings that were available. Close, but not quite the right deal. Bakersfield is about 90 miles from Burbank. A workable move. For some reason, I wasn't even thinking about Ventura County, even though it's only 40-50 miles from Burbank. I'd never been to Fillmore or Santa Paula.
One night I was on CraigsList, scouting around for buildings, and I happened to switch over to the Ventura County list, out of curiosity. And there was this strange ad, about an old building with a basement and shop space available for lease. There were hardly any pictures of the overall building, only some odd shots looking up at big old wooden truss structures in the ceiling. I thought it was interesting, bookmarked it and put it aside.
David Storrs had bought the building on foreclosure about a year earlier. David comes from the music business, educated in electrical engineering. He's a former pro-level country music style guitarist, but he'd made his millions managing and producing Ice-T and other early hip-hop artists. He has a big collection of fine guitars, and always admired Luthiers and other types of craftsmen. He finally got sick of the music business and got into buying a few commercial/industrial properties and leasing/managing them. He owns the buildings of a recording studio in Glendale, and several small woodworking and metalworking shops. He also owns a house in Malibu, right near the beach, and still surfs regularly. He's a couple of years older than me. A very cool guy, who's built himself a nice life.
He'd always liked big old historic industrial buildings, and wanted to see them be saved and rebuilt into something useful. He particularly liked the idea of dividing up an old building and leasing it to a group of smaller craftsman-type businesses. An efficient way for them to operate, and a good use for an historic place. And an old building full of Luthiers was a dream of his.
He'd been looking at different old fruit packing houses around the LA area, and found this one in the little town of Fillmore, up in Ventura County. It's one of the oldest ones still around, with a long history, in the middle of this little old classic California town.
The building was in trouble. The owner had gone bankrupt and the building had gone into foreclosure. It had been damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Not real severely, but enough that the older half of the building had been red-tagged and was, officially, unusable. There was only one tenant, Steve Butcher, occupying the main floor of the new wing. Steve has a big operation restoring old Airstream and Spartan trailers. He'd been in the building since 2004 (and is still here now).
The unique thing about this building was this giant basement, 7' underground and almost a large as the main floor. About 30,000 sf and big enough to drive trucks into. By its design, it always stayed cool, year around. A giant underground refrigerator for storing oranges. In its day (the 1930's) this place was high tech. Plus there was another special feature: An aerospace company had owned the building during the 1990's, using it to store and repair older airliner parts. Their insurance company had made them install a massive fire sprinkler system, costing a million bucks.
It's such an unusual combination. A historic old building, with a giant cool basement and a modern sprinkler system. And its location and geometry prevent it from being converted into a modern factory or condos or medical offices. It was stuck, and had been sitting semi-abandoned (except for Steve) for about 12 years.
David saw the potential for the building. It fit his dream of turning it into a quiet craftsman shop center. He got a group of investors together and they bought the building for quite cheap, less than a million. He made a deal with the city that he would repair the earthquake damage, restore the building to a fairly historic appearance, and lease it out for storage and small craftsman-type shops. This happened in 2012, and he got an engineering crew going on the structural repairs in the old wing. The repairs got going in 2013, and he started running an ad on CraigsList, scouting for craftsman businesses that might be willing to move to Fillmore.
I put the ad aside for about a week, but I kept thinking about it. Maybe Ventura County was a better location than Bakersfield? I finally called the number and got David on the phone. He'd only gotten a few calls from the ad, and he was thrilled that I was an actual Luthier! I drove up a few days later and met him. We got along great immediately, and I saw the building and the town as perfect for my dream of my future. A couple days later David visited my shop in Burbank, and he was impressed. That was it. He saw me as the right guy to help him get the whole craftsman shop thing going in his building. We closed a deal, and I started packing.
That's how it happened. His dream and my dream fit right together. I moved in and got set up, and took over most of the day-to-day management of the place. For the first year, I was basically in here by myself in the basement, with just Steve upstairs doing the trailers. I set the example in building up my shop, and worked to bring in other similar tenants. By 2016, I had convinced a group of my buddy Luthiers to move in here too. The earthquake repairs in the old wing were finished and the whole building became fully operational. We've kept adding storage and shop tenants, all kinds of interesting people and projects. A few problem tenants who came and went. But gradually finding the right people.
Here it is 2018. The building is about 70% full of tenants now. Some more shuffling and moving going on upstairs. We're still fighting a battle with the City over zoning and building & safety codes. But we appear to be winning, and I think it'll all get resolved through this fall. After staying quiet and secretive for the first couple of years, I'm now leading the effort to establish ourselves in the community. Let them know who we are and what we are doing here, and how we are helping to revitalize the city of Fillmore.
It's been a long bunch of work, but it's going well. The dream is coming together.
If you want to read back, the story of my move was happening real time near the end of Part 1 of the Love Of Ampegs thread, page 47, post #925. And a series of posts after that, to the end of Part 1. Thanks, Rich, for digging that out! I'll copy some of those posts here on this thread, below, to tie in the story here.
That was almost exactly 5 years ago. Hard to believe. In August 2013 I found this building and closed the deal on leasing space here. I started moving in September, bringing loads up. I continued doing some instrument work out of the Burbank shop through the end of November. Most of the main machines came up in December, and my first night in here in the building was Christmas Eve 2013. In a sleeping bag on the floor, surrounded by my machines. I resumed limited operations here in January 2014, and finally cleared the last debris out of the Burbank shop at the end of January.
The move took from September through the end of January. 45 miles each way, a total of 54 truck loads, about 32 tons. And believe it or not, I did it all by myself. All of the packing, loading, driving, unloading. The only real physical help I had was Keith (who I'd just met), on the load bringing up my biggest lathe. He helped me unload it and roll it around.
About 25 of the truckloads were with my old pickup, bring up smaller stuff. The other loads were with various rented trucks. I used the U-Haul box trucks by themselves, and towing different trailers. The biggest machines came up on a hydraulic lift trailer that lowers down flat to the ground, towed by a U-Haul truck. I also did six loads with a Ryder stake-bed truck with a lift gate. An enormous amount of work. And I sure hope I never have to move again.
How I found this building (or how it found me?) is surprisingly simple: CraigsList.
In the summer of 2013, I knew I had to move out of Burbank. As hard as I was struggling, I was falling behind on my rent. My landlord there was a great guy, very understanding. But his expenses were going up and he was going to have to raise the rent. I was no longer doing any work at Disney, down the street. And I wasn't making enough building instruments to cover it. It was obvious that I simply couldn't afford to stay there. No longer any real reason to stay. Burbank has become so insanely crowded with people and traffic, that I couldn't stand it any more. Time to get out of the big city. From now on, I was going to be a full time Luthier. No more rent money from other side work. I needed to find a cheaper, quieter place to run my business.
I was originally thinking of going to Bakersfield. As a grubby small industrial city, it appealed to me. I drove up to Bakersfield several times that summer, scouting around and looking at a few small buildings that were available. Close, but not quite the right deal. Bakersfield is about 90 miles from Burbank. A workable move. For some reason, I wasn't even thinking about Ventura County, even though it's only 40-50 miles from Burbank. I'd never been to Fillmore or Santa Paula.
One night I was on CraigsList, scouting around for buildings, and I happened to switch over to the Ventura County list, out of curiosity. And there was this strange ad, about an old building with a basement and shop space available for lease. There were hardly any pictures of the overall building, only some odd shots looking up at big old wooden truss structures in the ceiling. I thought it was interesting, bookmarked it and put it aside.
David Storrs had bought the building on foreclosure about a year earlier. David comes from the music business, educated in electrical engineering. He's a former pro-level country music style guitarist, but he'd made his millions managing and producing Ice-T and other early hip-hop artists. He has a big collection of fine guitars, and always admired Luthiers and other types of craftsmen. He finally got sick of the music business and got into buying a few commercial/industrial properties and leasing/managing them. He owns the buildings of a recording studio in Glendale, and several small woodworking and metalworking shops. He also owns a house in Malibu, right near the beach, and still surfs regularly. He's a couple of years older than me. A very cool guy, who's built himself a nice life.
He'd always liked big old historic industrial buildings, and wanted to see them be saved and rebuilt into something useful. He particularly liked the idea of dividing up an old building and leasing it to a group of smaller craftsman-type businesses. An efficient way for them to operate, and a good use for an historic place. And an old building full of Luthiers was a dream of his.
He'd been looking at different old fruit packing houses around the LA area, and found this one in the little town of Fillmore, up in Ventura County. It's one of the oldest ones still around, with a long history, in the middle of this little old classic California town.
The building was in trouble. The owner had gone bankrupt and the building had gone into foreclosure. It had been damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Not real severely, but enough that the older half of the building had been red-tagged and was, officially, unusable. There was only one tenant, Steve Butcher, occupying the main floor of the new wing. Steve has a big operation restoring old Airstream and Spartan trailers. He'd been in the building since 2004 (and is still here now).
The unique thing about this building was this giant basement, 7' underground and almost a large as the main floor. About 30,000 sf and big enough to drive trucks into. By its design, it always stayed cool, year around. A giant underground refrigerator for storing oranges. In its day (the 1930's) this place was high tech. Plus there was another special feature: An aerospace company had owned the building during the 1990's, using it to store and repair older airliner parts. Their insurance company had made them install a massive fire sprinkler system, costing a million bucks.
It's such an unusual combination. A historic old building, with a giant cool basement and a modern sprinkler system. And its location and geometry prevent it from being converted into a modern factory or condos or medical offices. It was stuck, and had been sitting semi-abandoned (except for Steve) for about 12 years.
David saw the potential for the building. It fit his dream of turning it into a quiet craftsman shop center. He got a group of investors together and they bought the building for quite cheap, less than a million. He made a deal with the city that he would repair the earthquake damage, restore the building to a fairly historic appearance, and lease it out for storage and small craftsman-type shops. This happened in 2012, and he got an engineering crew going on the structural repairs in the old wing. The repairs got going in 2013, and he started running an ad on CraigsList, scouting for craftsman businesses that might be willing to move to Fillmore.
I put the ad aside for about a week, but I kept thinking about it. Maybe Ventura County was a better location than Bakersfield? I finally called the number and got David on the phone. He'd only gotten a few calls from the ad, and he was thrilled that I was an actual Luthier! I drove up a few days later and met him. We got along great immediately, and I saw the building and the town as perfect for my dream of my future. A couple days later David visited my shop in Burbank, and he was impressed. That was it. He saw me as the right guy to help him get the whole craftsman shop thing going in his building. We closed a deal, and I started packing.
That's how it happened. His dream and my dream fit right together. I moved in and got set up, and took over most of the day-to-day management of the place. For the first year, I was basically in here by myself in the basement, with just Steve upstairs doing the trailers. I set the example in building up my shop, and worked to bring in other similar tenants. By 2016, I had convinced a group of my buddy Luthiers to move in here too. The earthquake repairs in the old wing were finished and the whole building became fully operational. We've kept adding storage and shop tenants, all kinds of interesting people and projects. A few problem tenants who came and went. But gradually finding the right people.
Here it is 2018. The building is about 70% full of tenants now. Some more shuffling and moving going on upstairs. We're still fighting a battle with the City over zoning and building & safety codes. But we appear to be winning, and I think it'll all get resolved through this fall. After staying quiet and secretive for the first couple of years, I'm now leading the effort to establish ourselves in the community. Let them know who we are and what we are doing here, and how we are helping to revitalize the city of Fillmore.
It's been a long bunch of work, but it's going well. The dream is coming together.
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BassHappy
Supporting Member
Hey Bruce
What a great story! Thanks so much for taking the time. Wow Craigslist is surprising. I thought sure it was a real estate agent somewhere or a friend of a friend. How cool that you found such a great home and you were able to turn so many others on to it. You should definitely write a book, or embellish your posts here into a book. I would most certainly buy it and read it!
By the way, I meant to follow up on the TV series shoot that was done here in April. My posts about it are on pages 5 & 6 of this thread. It was for the series called Shooter, the ongoing action-adventure story of Bob Lee Swagger, ex-Marine Sniper. They filmed a big gunfight chase scene in an underground bunker, all done here in the Secret Underground Lab, right down the hall from me. That scene is in Season 3 Episode 7. Here's a YouTube Highlights video of that episode. The portion that was filmed here starts at about 1:55, and is all filmed in green light. You can see the heroes running around through tunnels and doors, shooting at the bad guys, blowing things up, and finally breaking through a blocked up doorway to escape from the underground fortress! I haven't seen the whole episode, but these highlights show the general idea.
Edit: Well, the YouTube video link that I had posted has apparently been cut for some reason. Probably one of those Violation Of Copyright Rules things. But anyway, it's the TV series Shooter, Season 3, Episode 7. Look it up if you are curious.
Edit: Well, the YouTube video link that I had posted has apparently been cut for some reason. Probably one of those Violation Of Copyright Rules things. But anyway, it's the TV series Shooter, Season 3, Episode 7. Look it up if you are curious.
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Damn, I get is the message "Video Unavailable - The uploader has not made this video available in your country."
This happens quite regularly with videos posted on TB by you guys over the pond.
This happens quite regularly with videos posted on TB by you guys over the pond.
- Jan 28, 2009
- 2,929
- 4,152
- Disclosures
- Owner: Moonshine Custom Guitars
Just when you thought the Secret Underground Laboratory couldn't get any cooler...
Moonshine
Moonshine
After all that mayhem back in the spring, it's been quiet and peaceful here in the Lab through the summer and fall. Several of the non-Luthier tenants have moved out. No gun battles or movie people in the hallways. We officially have 8 Luthiers in here now, including our new apprentice Alex and Jon Wilson's son Andrew.
