[Bell Historians] Tubular chimes

[Robert Lewis]

At 18:53 04/10/2005, Dave Kelly wrote:

>We (Keltek Trust) have had an enquiry for a tubular chime. Are there any 
>companies still casting tubular bells? We did manage to re-locate a couple 
>of sets of Harrington's chimes to Western Australia year or so ago but do 
>not know of any which are available for re-use.

Orchestras use scaled-down versions of these things, so presumably someone, 
somewhere is still producing them on a commercial basis.

Also I recall seeing an advert in a clock magazine a couple of years ago 
for replacement tubular chimes for Edwardian long-case clocks. Companies 
like G&J, Elliots and Benson made quite a lot of Whittington/St 
Michael/Westminster (8/9) tubular bell chiming clocks in the early 1900s, 
which can now command remarkably high prices at auction (sometimes £5-9k). 
But quite often they are missing one or more tubes which, like pendulums, 
weights and other easily detachable bits often get lost in storage or 
transit. A missing or partial set of tubes reduces the value of one of 
these clocks considerably.


RAL