Bells 5 and 6 raised

Bells 5 and 6 have been raised tonight. Here is a video of the 5th swinging in its pit.

The 6th just needs the slider and rope fitting, and it's finished.

The 5th needs the slider board modifying, the slider fitting, and the pulley raising by 85mm before it too is finished.

Great progress on bells 6 and 5

The 6th bell is now in place and the bearings bolted down. This enabled the bell to be raised by the wheel.

In the next pit, the 5th bell now has its wheel bolted onto the headstock. Once the alignment has been checked, it too will be bolted to the frame and ready for swinging up.

Both bells will then need their sliders and pulleys moving up by 85mm, the stays fitted followed by the rope and clapper.

Then onto the 4th which should be fairly straightforward. The difficult bells will be the 2nd and 3rd which will require some extra steelwork to tie the 1911 framework to the rest of the bellframe. There will be more on this when we get there...!

1, 7 and 8 finished

We now have three bells fully ringable!

This is the 7th bell set at handstroke.

And this is the bell being rung from down in the ringing room.

We have now started on the 6th, and the wheel is now fitted to enable the bell to be aligned in its pit.

7th bell nearly finished

The 7th bell is now virtually complete! Having repositioned the slider 85mm higher, the bell was raised by hand to check that it sets both ways.

Everything lined up nicely.

Here is a short clip of the bell lowering itself.

All that needs doing is the pulley to be raised 85mm.

Progress on the 7th

For the first time in a couple of years, the 7th bell is no longer sitting in a cradle made of off-cuts of steel salvaged from Malvern Link bell frame when I helped augment them back in 1993!

The bell is now sitting properly on its bed plates with the top half of the wheel in place.

The next job is to offer up the bottom of the wheel, and bolt it all together. Once it is all perfectly in line with the pulley (as checked with a plumb line) the bed plates will be coach-screwed to the frame.

After refitting the slider, and a few more minor tweaks, this bell will be finished and it will be on to the next one!

A ring of two!

Strensham are now a ring of two!

We finished hanging the tenor tonight, put the rope, stay and slider on, and tried it out.

The next bell to finish will be the 7th, with the other to follow. The 2nd and 3rd are a bit more complicated and will be done last.

Swinging tenor

The tenor is now sitting on its bearing, next to the treble.

The bed plates were collected over the weekend, so bell by bell they can now be fitted. The tenor was fitted tonight, and the bed plates fixed to the frame with coach screws. The bottom half of the wheel was put in place to check the alignment with the pulley.

All that needs doing now is to fit the stay and slider and to move the pulley up 85mm. The refurbished bearings mean that the bell is 85mm higher up!