[Bell Historians] Repair or Renewal

[fartwell2000]

--- In bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com, "Iain Mitchell" <i.w.mitchell at ...> wrote:
>
> The industry in my experience tends to do as the customer asks, sometimes to the detriment of the ring..............However, one question that should be asked is this.
> Are bells a musical instrument,along with the organ? if so, then surely it is in the best interests of everyone to ensure they are restored to a good as condition as possible, I don’t advocate recasting for the sake of recasting but I would prefer to see bells hung in decent frames and fittings. If EH or SPAB etc want to see old frames conserved then please will they pay for the removal and storage of aforementioned frames so they do not continue to rot high up in church towers, which in my opinion, will only cause more cost to the parishes in the future.
> On the other hand, if they are just a toy for bellringers...................
> 
> IWM
> 
> 

Some good points made.

Personally, I'd prefer it if the founders and hangers had a free hand in what went on-they are the best people to ask how to expect the end result to be.

When it comes to bells listed for preservation, sometimes there is too much limitation on tuning, or no tuning is allowed. But what is being forgotten is that not all founders were competant to tune bells that they cast- maybe they didn't have enough knowledge and/or tools available or maybe that they just couldn't cast a bell close enough to the required note and did minimal tuning just to get a new bell to be somewhere close enough to fit with other bells. But that doesn't mean to say that an untuned or partially tuned 300 year old bell sounds as it founder hoped it would sound.

A lot of the conservation groups do have too much say in what goes on, and I imagine a fair few of us have seen jobs that do not reflect in a long lasting, value for money job, or a job where the end result is not quite as hoped, due to interference from the conservation groups.

Lets see these groups "Flash the cash"!

Alan