Here is a video posted on on YouTube of some high quality ringing on the bells at Strensham rung by a visiting band from Devon. Enjoy!
As for the bells, the swing times and clapper times have now been (nearly sorted) with just the 5th and 7th needing some further minor tweaking.
There is still quite a bit of tidying up to do, but essentially the project is complete and regular ringing can resume.
As part of the national Heritage Open Days for 2021, I gave two talks in the church. These were on the church and bells, which of course outlined the augmentation project.
The only house next to the church is on the north-east side of the tower, and reducing the volume of the bells as much as possible on this side is important.
Both the north and east sides now have timber blocking the tower windows. To make it even more effective, a layer of carpet tiles is needed to reduce the sound level even more. The north side was completed recently, and the east side needs doing next.
The west side will be kept fully open but the south side will be partially blocked as the 3rd bell swings into the window opening and rings louder than the other bells as a result and is very noticeable when listening from the outside. Blocking up the bottom half of the window will prevent this from happening.
We have a fantastic new carpet!
It really looks lovely. Now we need some new mats to go with it.
A new carpet is being fitted in a couple of days, so tonight we got as much as possible out of the way. The old carpet was rolled up and taken away and the floor vacuumed in readiness.
The two benches left behind are too big and heavy to take down the ladder so the carpet fitter will just have to move them aside and work around them.
The Worcester Catherdal young ringers came for a visit, and this meant that all 8 bells were rung for the first time since February 2020.
Here is a view from above.
One of the important jobs still outstanding was to bring the swing times into alignment. These are measured by the "Oddstruckness Meter" I make. Getting the timings correct will help improve the overall standard of the ringing and it is worth taking the time to get these fine details correct.
To do this, two pieces of metal weighing a total of 1.5kg were bolted to the vertical spokes of the wheel as shown here.
As you can see, the timings are now very close to the ideal curve (thin black line).
