[dabrdabr]

The wall jack currently has some gray pieces already wired however the wires have disintegrated can I cut this off restrip the wire coming out of the wall and install a regular flush jack. If not how difficult would it be to rewire a wall phone jack?

[Stratmando]

Easy, Just hook red to red, green to green which is usually line 1.
Then yellow to yellow, green to green for line 2.
You may have twisted pairs(UTP), then hook white/blue to green, blue/white to red, white/orange to black and orange/white to yellow.
If still no luck, look for 48 volts DC on a pair(red is negative and green is positive).
If someone calls while you are touching the wires, you can get shocked, Haven't known it to kill, enough to remind you not to touch both at the same time.

[ebaines]

If someone calls while you are touching the wires, you can get shocked, Haven't known it to kill, enough to remind you not to touch both at the same time.

First a true confession - which you may find amusing, Stratmando -then a more seroius story:

When I first joined Bell Labs way back in the pre-divestiture days my mentor took me to an NJ Bell central office to see how things worked. We were looking at a Main Distributing Frame (MDF), and as we were talking with the CO supervisor I absent-mindedly leaned up against the exposed terminals where the switch gets cross-connected to the outside plant pairs. Of course you know, and I know (now) that -48v DC is always present on these lines, and that if ringing is applied you get 96 volts AC added on. Well, as you might guess, with the palm of my hand bridged across perhaps 20 pairs of exposed outside plant terminals I received a pretty surprising shock, which caused my hand to jerk back and I dropped my notebok. I tried to act nonchalant about it, but of course, everyone laughed at the stupid newbie.

On a more serious note - several years later I heard about a case of a technician who fell off a ladder while working on one of those old 14-foot tall MDFs. He ended up paralyzed. He claimed that he felt a pain in his arm while tacing a jumper wire - I guess he may have been shocked and then recoiled from it just as I had, but unfortunately he was in a far more dangerous place when it happened to him.

So yes - be aware of ringing voltages.

[Stratmando]

An old post but saw a mistake in my first response:
Line 2 is usually yellow and black, not yellow and green.