St Pater's Italian Church

[Alan J.Birney]

--- In bellhistorians at y..., "jim phillips" <jim at p...> wrote:
> Chris Pickford quoting an inspection by Nigel Taylor:-
> 
> >The bell has an enormous odd looking clapper and is clocked
> 
> Having heard this bell from St Paul's in the 1950's it sounded as 
if the
> bell was given an enormous whack by the clapper. As the bell was 
clocked I
> write to ask the question whether 'clocking' a steel bell can ever 
crack it?
> Has anyone ever heard of a steel bell becoming cracked? Can a 
steel bell be
> tuned like a conventional bell and would a coat of anti corrosion 
paint
> affect the bell tone?

I understand that the ex Bootle bells(now hung as the back six at 
Hale) were tuned in the normal way by the Merseyside bell restoration 
group(i.e vertical lathe) and sound quite good-however when they were 
augmented to eight using two redundent steel bells as the new trebles 
the result was not very good, so the two steel trebles of the eight 
were scrapped and replaced with bronze bells-the splice of the back 
six and the two bronze trebles sounds quite good from memory(it is 
going on for sixteen years or so since I had a ring there).
I seem to remember seeing somewhere that E+S did a rehang on a 
steel five(Thornborough?) and the bells were painted with rustproof 
paint and fitted with clapper springs and the result there is 
apparantly quite good as well.
I wonder if anyone other than the Merseyside bell restoration group 
has thought about tuning steel bells-it can be done,although like 
with bronze bells,there will be cases where it is not possible.
Alan