help understand leads of slug tuned coil

Hi i need to know what each pin on a part is. it is a square metal box. there are three pins along one side. there are two pins on the other side.

Does the slug have a color?

Can you upload a photo of it?

Did you remove it from a piece of equipment?

it is a silver colored metal box. about 3/8" square. it is from my pile of stuff, but probably from a cordless home phone. is there a "normal" pin out diagram for this type of part? The inductance values i get on my MASTECH meter are so small that i cant be sure which lead is the mid tap lead. I figure the other two might be a built in capacitor to create a canned LC tank?

I would say the primary side is the one with three pins. The center pin would be the center-tap of the primary. You should get equal inductance both halves ... center to one outside and then center to the other outside. The secondary should be the two pin side.

Being from a cordless phone, I would suspect the inductances to be low. If you know the model number you could get an idea of the frequencies being used. You might want to bag your components that you can't readily identify with where you harvested them. If you remember the model number, you might find a schematic to aid in identification.

Finally, since your questioning your meter, you might want to devise a circuit to test the inductance.

These things were a general high frequency coil former and case and were made with a range of magnetic materials to suit the operating frequency. The side with 2 pins generally has an untapped winding connected, and the side with 3 pins has a tapped winding and the tapping went to the centre pin. The tapping point on the winding is positioned to suit the circuit requirements and could NOT be assumed to be a centre tap.
Cordless home phones are often designed around a 27- 40 mHz transmission band and the receiver techniques are base on a superheterodyne method with an intermediate frequency of 455 kHz.
The carrier frequency in these things is often derived from a crystal oscillator with a harmonic taken for the carrier frequency and it could be that your coil is part of the transmitter side.
You wont be able to measure inductance on this thing; the best way of understanding it is to see if you can find its resonant frequency. For this you'll need a signal generator. If you have one then get back to the thread for more info.

Look atL3 & L7 here: https://www.vintage-radio.com/repair-restore-information/valve_alignment.html

The pic I linked to are the IF cans (IF transformers) as they were called in vintage valve sets. These were pretty big, but at least you have an idea of it's use. They later were reduces to a very small size, on the order of less than 1 cm ^3 for small transistor radios.

These https://www.minikits.com.au/components/passive/inductors/if-transformers are probably what yours look like.