Now that the bells are back in the ringing chamber the most frequently asked question is "When will the bells start ringing again?" People are always a little surprised at the response that it will be a couple of weeks yet. Work has begun to connect all the numerous bits and pieces together, but the problem is that there are so many bits and pieces to connect and they have to be connected with absolute precision.
On Wednesday Kevan and Owen Borlase and I met at the church to make a start on the reconstruction. Over the course of the day we adjusted the position of all the bells in their pits, attached all the wheels and the stays to the bells, checked the alignment of the wheels with the floor boss holes and swung each bell by hand to establish that they would move freely.
Alas, not all the bells were as well aligned as we would have liked. The Treble only just cleared the frame when it was swung and the number three bell clipped the raised lettering of its frame. So Kevan and I returned on Thursday to quickly sort out these issues. The Treble gave us no problem, the bell was realigned within twenty minutes or so which gave us a false sense of our achievements. It took us another hour and a half to persuade the third to sit square in the pit, properly aligned with its bearings and a full 2 mm clear of the lettering on the frame. At last the job was done and we had achieved just about as much as we could to prepare the bells. On Monday 12th August Taylor's will return to assemble the the sliders, running boards, pulley boxes, ropes and so forth. There is still a great deal of work to be done.
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