It was suggested to me by a co-worker to take a Bluetooth headset and build it into an old-school telephone handset. Since this violates the very purpose of a small wireless headset... I figured I had to do it! So I ran out and picked up a Jabra 250 and started looking for an antique phone. I had problems finding a real antique that was the shape and look I wanted. So this gave me another challenge: to take the new replica handset I ended up purchasing and make it look old and abused. Ah yes, now I'm starting to have some fun with this mod!

Here is the Jabra 250 headset that I used. Nothing special, just a plain old headset. It’s a little pricey, but since I would be adding material around it I wanted one with great signal strength.

First things first. Let’s pop it open and see what we have to work with.
Opening it up was a simple matter -- I only had to remove one screw and it popped right apart. It starting out a little easy... (Oops – can’t say that!)

Once it's apart, you can see that the guts are pretty small, which is what I was hoping for since the handset of the phone I purchased was not very thick.

The first piece to be cut was the wood portion of the handset. It needed to be sliced in two, because I would have to hollow it out to accept the Bluetooth guts.

Once it was sliced in two, I laid the Jabra circuit board down. To my delight, the handle is just perfectly thick enough. I traced the outline of the circuit board with it in place.

Here is the board traced.

I used a router bit on my Dremel tool to hollow out the area for the circuit board, battery, and charging plug.

With the routing done, I glued the charging plug and handset ends in place.
Now it’s starting to come together.

Next, I placed the battery in place and prepared to solder the microphone and speaker leads to the circuit board.

Here you can see the parts all installed. The tape was being used to hold the wires in place while they were being soldered. I decided to leave a couple pieces to help hold the circuit board in place while the other half of the handle is being fastened to it.

Once everything was installed, I used a black paper tape to wrap the handle halves together. This was partly so if I needed to get back into the handle I could -- if I glued it, it would be permanent. Also, I used tape because I think it makes it look like a cheap way the handle might have been repaired in the past.

I decided to paint the whole thing with black gloss paint. It occurred to me that lots of those old phones were solid black. So the paint gave me the opportunity to scratch it all up before and after it was dry.

Here you can see I used sawdust. The sawdust will scratch the surface but not gouge it very deep. If you want deeper scratches use dirt, etc.

That’s all there is to it. Now I can enjoy the looks on my friends’ faces when my cell phone rings and I whip out this giant old school handset. :)