[Bell Historians] Whitechapel charges

[fartwell2000]

--- In bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com, "Bickerton, Roderic (SELEX GALILEO, UK)" <Roderic.Bickerton at ...> wrote:
>
>  
>  I would venture to suggest that no one should be going with just one
> quote.
> There are plenty of examples of different companies giving different
> proposals as to how something should be done, with widely differing
> technical and cost issues. for a recent example talk to the people at
> Ripon.
> No one company is going to be a consistent winner, or put it another
> way, getting a single quotation is unlikely to yield the best possible
> installation.
>

   I don't totally agree Rod.

     Having been brought up on a lot of Taylor rings, and with some very poor examples of (old and new style) London sourced rings in my area (Lancs/Yorks), Barnoldswick was only ever going to be a Taylor job and they were the only ones asked to qoute-The band and PCC agreed 100% with this and the DAC didn't have a problem with this either.

  The end result surprised everyone-The combination of Rudhalls, 1870 JT and two new TE&S Tenor have been compared by others as being at least as good as the Taylor True harmonic back 6 at St Martin le Grand, York. At Barlick, the new ring has certainly surpassed local expectations and hopefully the new Trebles will be in fairly quickly. This was (unless I am corrected) the last ever complete TE&S job and proves how good that Company really was.

   Incidentally, Taylors were the cheapest qoute at Bolton by Bowland-and they have a very fine six with all stages of work done by Taylors.

   Surely the best possible result is achieved by giving the giving the foundries (all 3-let us not forget Richard Bowditch and MRTH) and hangers a free hand to suggest what should happen to bells in a ring.

  For example, the founders should by now have an idea of how to design new castings to match old. There is no point in others dictating how much tuning should happen either-sometimes the results are poor when there has been limitation imposed by others. For example,If someone was going to argue that a poor sounding ring by W Mears should not be tuned as they are rare, I would argue that yes they are rare, but without being tuned, have they ever been heard as the founder intended them to be heard?

 Let the hangers lop the canons off-if there are only three bells by "X" founder in existance then maybe thats a different matter, but I've been surprised to see recent rehangs (for ringing) where canons have been retained on Mears and Taylor bells. Personally, I don't see the point. I am of the opinion that where canon retaining stocks are concerned, its difficult to overcome the laws of physics.

  I would suggest that sometimes, there is too much "outside" interference when it comes to those who do the hanging casting work-it must be very frustrating sometimes for those who tune and rehang bells when they have limitations imposed on them and they know that a better result could be achieved if the were left to get on with it.

Alan