Casting
New bells from 3 cwt to 60 cwt, in loam, struck off a strickle board turned to your profile. Poured at 1,120°C on the first Thursday of the month.
From £6,400 per cwt
Bellfounders · Nidderdale · est. 1847
Cast to outlast the tower
We still pour our own metal — 78% copper, 22% tin, one alloy, no substitutes. We cast it, tune it on all five partials, hang it on its frame, and come back every five years to check our own work.
- Last poured
- 14 March · 41 cwt
- Bells in the ground
- 2,314
- Oldest still ringing
- 1851 · Kirkby Malzeard
- Tuned to
- 5 partials, ±2 cents
I to the church the living call · and to the grave do summon all
Code of Practice
All work to the CBC Conservation and Repair of Bells and Bellframes. Your faculty and your grant both go more smoothly for it.
DAC & faculty
We write the technical sections of the petition, at no charge, and have been through the DAC in five dioceses.
Insured & certificated
£10m public liability. All lifting equipment inspected, certificated and insured; frames galvanised to BS EN ISO 1461.
Still here
Six generations in one yard. The last foundry to close took 447 years of records with it — we are not planning to be the next.
Published, because your appeal needs a number
Five rungs, and most towers need two
Nobody in this trade publishes prices, which is strange, because a parish cannot launch an appeal or apply to a restoration fund without one. Here is the whole ladder. Start at the bottom rung and we will tell you honestly how far up you need to come.
Survey
No charge
Inspect
£480 per tower
Retune
£1,900 per bell
Rehang
From £4,200 per bell
Recast
From £6,400 per cwt
For scale: a six-bell rehang on new fittings runs £6,000–£15,000; a full retune and rehang of a ring of six is £60,000–£100,000. Excludes scaffolding, faculty fees and the crane. Retune and rehang are almost always done together — taking a ring down twice costs more than everything on this ladder put together.
The yard
A bell is the gap between two piles of loam
That is not a figure of speech. We build a solid core in the shape of the inside of the bell, build a cope over it in the shape of the outside, lift the cope, take out the pattern between them, put the cope back — and pour bronze into the space that is left.
Everything else is consequence. The wall must run thin at the waist and four times thicker at the sound-bow or the bell will not speak. The loam must dry for eleven days or it will steam and blow the mould apart. We have never found a shortcut worth the loss of a casting, and we have lost enough to know.
How the work goes, start to finish →
Five things, done properly
What we do
Tuning & retuning
True-harmonic on the vertical lathe: hum, prime, tierce, quint and nominal brought inside two cents. Old-style bells that have never been tuned are our favourite work.
£1,900 per bellFrames & hanging
Galvanised steel or English oak on a lowside frame, trial-assembled in the yard before anything goes up a ladder. Headstocks, gudgeons, wheels, stays, sliders, roller boxes, ropes.
From £4,200 per bellRestoration & stitching
Cracked bells are stitched cold, not welded — drilled, keyed and locked, so the casting never goes near a furnace and the tuning survives. Canons re-fitted where they were cut off.
From £3,100Inspection & reports
A written report your architect can act on and your DAC will accept: a measured scale plan of frame, fittings and foundation beams, gudgeon and bearing wear, crown-staple corrosion, and what it costs to leave it.
£480 per towerA course of six
How a job actually runs
From the first phone call to the first time the band pulls off. Twenty-two weeks is typical for a full ring; a single retune is six. The faculty is ours to make easy, not yours to fear.
1
We come and look
Someone from the yard climbs your tower, weighs and measures every bell, photographs the frame from underneath, and writes down what is actually there rather than what the last report said.
2
A drawing, a number, and your faculty wording
A sectional drawing, a specification your architect can check, one price with the exclusions on the same page — and the technical sections of the faculty petition written for you. Grant bodies want quotations; this is the document they want.
3
Pattern and mould
The strickle board is turned to the profile, the core built up in loam over brick, the cope built over the core — and then it dries for eleven days while everyone finds something else to do.
4
The pour
First Thursday of the month, 1,120°C, forty seconds of actual pouring after nine weeks of preparation. You are welcome to stand at the edge of the pit and watch it, and most people do.
5
Tuning
Onto the vertical lathe mouth up, and metal comes off the inside until all five partials sit where they should. You are sent the strobe readings before and after, whether or not you asked for them.
6
Up the tower
Frame in first and levelled, then bells, fittings, ropes — then two days of us pulling them ourselves before anyone else is allowed to. We hand over when the odd-struckness is gone, not when the invoice is ready.
Out of the pit
Recent work
Ring of eight
St Cuthbert, Pateley Bridge
Tenor recast from the 1798 metal after eighty years cracked. The other seven retuned to it rather than the other way round.
24-1-3 in E · £96,400 · 2024
Rehang
Ripon, St Wilfrid
Ten bells down, new steel lowside frame on the old oak sill, ball bearings throughout. The ringers were back up for Advent.
Ten bells · £71,800 · 2023
Restoration
Holy Trinity, Skipton
Fifth stitched cold across a 340 mm fracture, then retuned. It had not been rung since 1971.
8-2-14 in A · £11,250 · 2025
From the towers
What they say afterwards
“We were told the old tenor could not be made to agree with the rest. Hollowbeck did not argue with us — they took it away, and it came back a different bell. The band noticed before I did.”
“They wrote the technical half of our faculty petition without being asked and without charging. The DAC passed it first time. That alone saved us a year.”
“Their quinquennial told us plainly that we had four years, not ten. It was not what we wanted and it was the reason we still have a ring.”
No charge for the visit
Send us the tower, not the specification
Tell us where it is and what it is doing. We will come and look, take the weights and diameters ourselves, and write down what we find — including when the honest answer is that it can wait five years. You keep the measurements either way.