5320 and 5330 spring hook lever failures

[PokerMunkee]

We are seeing almost all of the springs that control the HOOK button fail on our 5320e and 5330e phones.  I can't believe Mitel designed it this way, this is not acceptable.

Even if we take apart the phones and readjust the little metal spring, it works for a while and fails again. 

Does anyone have a permanent solution to fix this?  I don't want to buy new 69xx phones just yet. 

[acejavelin]

We are seeing almost all of the springs that control the HOOK button fail on our 5320e and 5330e phones.  I can't believe Mitel designed it this way, this is not acceptable.

Even if we take apart the phones and readjust the little metal spring, it works for a while and fails again. 

Does anyone have a permanent solution to fix this?  I don't want to buy new 69xx phones just yet.

Weird... How old are these 5320e/5330e sets? We have thousands of them installed for customers and rarely ever see a hookswitch problem, or really any problem for that matter, we probably don't replace 8-10 a year for failures, most of which are abuse or "accidents", but it is very rare to see a failure for no reason of a phone in service.

Did you buy all of these at once? Maybe you got a bad batch...

[Willtech]

Are you sure it a hookswitch issue and not a firmware issue? I had same issue with one customer on a certain software release and when I upgraded to last 8.0 release I haven’t had issue since.  The way I found it was I took bad phone back to office on different SW version and problem went away.

[VinceWhirlwind]

We are seeing almost all of the springs that control the HOOK button fail on our 5320e and 5330e phones.  I can't believe Mitel designed it this way, this is not acceptable.

Even if we take apart the phones and readjust the little metal spring, it works for a while and fails again. 

Does anyone have a permanent solution to fix this?  I don't want to buy new 69xx phones just yet.

We've rolled out about 2,000 of these and not had this problem. In fact, not had any problem with them, hardly ever get any back broken.

[VinceWhirlwind]

Having said that, upgrade your controllers and start buying the 6930, they are way better than the 53xx.
We stopped buying the 6920, far too many of them were faulty.

[PokerMunkee]

Thanks for the feedback!

Don't know, maybe it was a bad batch.  Phones were built in 2013, installed early 2014.  Half of the 5330e were bluetooth handsets.  We had probably 10 or so regular handsets fail, no one could hear you. 

What issues are you having with the 6920?  I have two and haven't seen any issues, yet.  One's at my desk even.  I have two 6940s and it's my favorite so far.  Can buy them online for $265, pretty good value.  My dealer wanted over $420! lol

The 6930 doesn't come with a bluetooth handset, right?  Seems like it's better to go to the 6940 if you want wireless handset.  I'll pull the trigger and buy about 20 of them once I figure out if I want 6930 or 6940.

[VinceWhirlwind]

We had heaps of 6920s with faulty screens. At least 1 in 10. It just isn't worth going through all the rigmarole of RMAing 6920s when the 6930 is only a few $$ more so we only buy those now.
 
The 6930 supports a wireless headset so I assume it would do a handset as well, not sure, we only put out wireless handsets with the 6940s.

[sarond]

The 6930 supports wireless handsets but by the time you buy it it's actually cheaper to buy a 6940 that come with it standard.

[Iphoneman73]

I have a mix of around 800 or so 5320 and 5330 phones inside a Hospital and I have the same issue with the hook switch springs. These phones was not all purchased at the same time, some of them are two or three years newer and they all have the same issue. I have taken apart around 2/3's of these phones and added flex points to the springs. However after a year or so they are all starting to have the same issue again. I have called Mitel and was told that this is a new issue they have never heard of before. Sure seems everyone else has heard of it.

[ccuster]

I work in health care and support along with one other analyst, around 1500 phones. we have been struggling with this for a couple years now. people pointing at firmware/software issues -- that never made sense as its a fraction of the phones we support -- .

we took into account where these phones have failed and many times its within one facility or one dept. considered the oHs and cleaning practices being used and thought that it was the solution or amount of liquid saturating the phones.

I have recently began taking the phones apart as replacing is becoming expensive. I assume the spring (wire) has SOME tensile memory and if rebent or straightened it will be good for a while at least BUT i am coming to the belief that it is still a result of the oHs cleaning practices and that the pressure put on the hook switch while cleaning is more than what it would experience with just the receiver being place and pushing it down.

I am considering either finding replacement springs from vendor OR old broken phones and doubling up the springs.

[hospitalIT]

Hospital IT dept here, we have 5-600 5330e phones in our fleet, most installed from 2014-2015 time frame.  Starting to get hookswitch spring issues pretty regularly now.  Going to try one of two things to prop up these phones until we can get replacments. 

1) remove hook spring and cut 1/8-1/4" off each end, re-bend the 90 degree catches on the end of the springs and re-seat the spring.  Reduced length of spring should increase the spring force a little bit and buy you some more time.
*edit* Cutting the spring didn't actually improve the mean time between failures...it just took more work to cut it and the phone still operated poorly.

2) Another user on this forum suggested using #9 piano wire to rebuild the spring from scratch.


http://mitelforums.com/forum/index.php?topic=6322.msg49057#msg49057

[cabarrushealth]

We're starting to see this issue and loosening the screw i circled a bit seems to fix the problem for us.

[demery]

All,  I have found a fix for this issue that works 100% of the time.  I too thought the spring was getting weak and was re-bending it to get the phones to be able to go off hook but the problem continued to come back.  I have even had to RMA phones back to the manufacturer over this issue till we found out what was causing the problem.

To fix this issue and it also works for buttons that are not reliable anymore as well.  You must take the main circuit board off of the phone exposing the button pads.  Just tilt the board to the side so you don't have to disconnect the speaker.  Next you have to clean the little metal cups at the bottom of each button including the hook flash button with a Q-Tip and some alcohol.  I also clean the contacts on the circuit board where the buttons press with the Q-Tip as well.  Then reassemble the phone and all of your buttons will work like new again and the handset hook will also work properly.

This issue is caused by corrosion in the contact and when I was tensioning the spring it was causing the button to press harder which continued to make the contact till the corrosion got too much for an electrical contact to be made to answer the phone.  By cleaning the contacts it puts the phone back to a brand new state and the electrical contacts work properly. 

Key note, don't over clean the rubber membrane too much because I believe they may have an electrically conductive material on them and don't want to wash away too much of it. 

[PokerMunkee]

All,  I have found a fix for this issue that works 100% of the time.  I too thought the spring was getting weak and was re-bending it to get the phones to be able to go off hook but the problem continued to come back.  I have even had to RMA phones back to the manufacturer over this issue till we found out what was causing the problem.

To fix this issue and it also works for buttons that are not reliable anymore as well.  You must take the main circuit board off of the phone exposing the button pads.  Just tilt the board to the side so you don't have to disconnect the speaker.  Next you have to clean the little metal cups at the bottom of each button including the hook flash button with a Q-Tip and some alcohol.  I also clean the contacts on the circuit board where the buttons press with the Q-Tip as well.  Then reassemble the phone and all of your buttons will work like new again and the handset hook will also work properly.

This issue is caused by corrosion in the contact and when I was tensioning the spring it was causing the button to press harder which continued to make the contact till the corrosion got too much for an electrical contact to be made to answer the phone.  By cleaning the contacts it puts the phone back to a brand new state and the electrical contacts work properly. 

Key note, don't over clean the rubber membrane too much because I believe they may have an electrically conductive material on them and don't want to wash away too much of it.

You sir, are a freakn' genius.  Tried it on only one phone but it WORKED!  THANKS!