Five things, done properly
No subcontractors, no shipping castings abroad for tuning, no frame bought in from a catalogue. It goes into the pit in this yard and it comes out of the tuning shop forty feet away.
In detail
Loam moulding over a strickle board turned to your profile — not a resin pattern, not a shell process. Eleven days drying, one pour, and the mould is broken to get the bell out, which is why there is no such thing as a second attempt at the same price.
From £6,400 per cwt · 3 to 60 cwtOn the vertical lathe, metal off the inside only. We will tell you before we start how much wall there is to lose and what the bell will weigh afterwards. Victorian bells that have never been tuned are our favourite work and our slowest.
£1,900 per bell · 5 partials to ±2 centsGalvanised steel or English oak on a lowside frame, trial-assembled in the yard so that nothing is cut on a scaffold. Elm headstocks where the faculty requires them, ball bearings everywhere else, and rope runs plotted before a hole is drilled.
Quoted per tower · 6 to 20 weeksCold metal stitching: the crack is drilled across, keyed with nickel-alloy locks and pinned, so the casting never goes near a furnace and the tuning survives. We have taken on bells that three foundries had written off, and lost two of them.
From £3,100 · assessed first, alwaysA written quinquennial your architect can put in front of a committee: gudgeon and bearing wear, crown-staple corrosion, frame movement measured not guessed, clapper condition, rope wear, and a costed five-year and ten-year position.
£480 per tower · report in 14 daysYou will not be paying for all of this
Almost every ring we have restored was paid for by four or five sources at once, and most parishes only know about one of them when they ring us. Every fund below wants the same thing in the application: a written quotation from a specialist working to the Code of Practice. That is the document we send you in week three.
Nearly every county guild runs a bell restoration fund. Yorkshire's opens twice a year and, like most, will consider up to a fifth of the project.
Up to 20% of project costThe CCCBR administers the Central Council Bell Restoration Fund and the Fred E Dukes International Bell Fund. Both want quotations and a realistic timetable.
Two funds · applications by deadlineIf a recast is out of reach, Keltek rehomes surplus and redundant bells and runs a Bell Rescue Fund. We have hung fourteen Keltek bells and will tell you when that is the better answer.
Bells, not cash — often worth moreNational Lottery Heritage Fund for the larger schemes, plus county historic churches trusts. Slower, larger, and they want the DAC on side first.
Typically the biggest single lineSpecification
| Bell | Note | Weight | Diameter | Cast |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Treble | E | 5-0-14 | 635 mm | 1902 |
| Second | D♯ | 5-2-7 | 667 mm | 1902 |
| Third | C♯ | 6-1-2 | 711 mm | 1902 |
| Fourth | B | 7-0-21 | 762 mm | 1902 |
| Fifth | A | 8-2-4 | 826 mm | 1849 |
| Sixth | G♯ | 10-1-16 | 902 mm | 1849 |
| Seventh | F♯ | 14-0-9 | 1,041 mm | 1849 |
| Tenor | E | 24-1-3 | 1,422 mm | 2024 |
Weights in hundredweight-quarters-pounds, as they have always been given. The 1849 bells are Jabez Marrick's; the 1902 five are Taylor's and we were glad to retune them.
Permission, and what it really involves
The permission process frightens more PCCs out of a project than the money does. It should not. Here is what it actually is.
Yes, for anything beyond routine maintenance — and it is granted by the Diocesan Chancellor, not by the DAC. The DAC advises, through its bell adviser, and for a historic frame the Church Buildings Council and Historic England may be consulted too. Minor works can sometimes go through as List B, which the Archdeacon can approve. The faculty process replaces listed building consent under the Ecclesiastical Exemption, so you are not also going to the council.
The petition is yours to submit; the technical half is ours to write, and we write it at no charge because a badly worded one comes back to us anyway. We have been through the DAC in five dioceses and can usually tell you which questions yours will ask before it asks them.
To the DAC, yes. The Church Buildings Council's advice is blunt: make sure your specialist follows the Code of Practice, because you are more likely to get your faculty and your funding if they do. All our work is to The Conservation and Repair of Bells and Bellframes.
A real constraint, not a formality. Towers are roosts, and bats and nesting birds are protected. We survey before we quote a start date, and we plan tower work around the roosting season rather than discovering it on the scaffold.
Usually, if the crack has not run into the sound-bow and nobody has tried to weld it. Stitching is cold work, so it does not disturb the tuning; welding heats the casting and almost always does. If someone has already welded it, tell us on the phone rather than when we arrive.
We write the technical sections of the faculty petition as part of the quote, at no charge, because a badly written one comes back to us anyway. We have been through the DAC in five dioceses and can tell you which questions yours will ask.
All of it, if you want it to. We melt the old bell, assay it, and correct the alloy with new ingot rather than replacing it. Most parishes ask for this and it costs slightly more, because the assay is real work and the tin usually needs topping up.
Yes. That is the point, and it is the part people are least prepared for. A ring that has been out of tune for a century is what the village thinks the church sounds like. We record before and after and we play both to the PCC before we start.
Gladly. A single bell in a village church is often the oldest thing anyone in the parish will ever touch, and it is usually hung on fittings that were a bad idea in 1890. Small jobs go in between the big ones and are quoted the same way.
Start at the bottom rung
Half a day in your tower tells us more than any amount of correspondence. You get the measurements whether or not you go on to use us.