Interesting bearing isolators

[John Schreiner <jeschreiner17 gmail com>]

Power has been off at the Gloucester shop for a day and a half now. While
looking at various ringing clips yesterday I noticed something interesting
at the new Dordrecht Grote Kirk installation in this video:
https://youtu.be/PJcxMTILB8c

The bearing pillow blocks are mounted on large rubber shock absorbers. I
wrote to Matthew Higby to ask if they really reduced the clapper clunk
without hurting the handling. He said yes, they did that, adding that Paul
DeKok did the research and that Higby & Co upsized the gudgeons in case
they wound up having more stress because of the movement. I have written to
Paul for more information on the mounting. As I understand it, he also
designed the frame, which has some other novel things going on.

This caught my attention because one of the problems at the Advent, as I
understand it, is that some parishioners aren't keen on the bells because
all they hear inside the church is "tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk ..."
and very little tone.

The fix, of course, is much more complicated than "just" adding the
isolators. The things take up a lot more space than the basic pillow blocks
and there are a couple of places where the bearings of neighboring bells
are too close together, so frame modifications (at the very least) would be
required.

Higby's are known for improving the tuning on pre-Simpson bells and adding
trebles to match, and as a good businessperson, he put forward that Mears
bells of that era tune up very nicely, The pie-in-the-sky project would be
retuning, adding two trebles, and a new frame with isolators. The church
would get better sound in the church and gentler movement of the tower
without the hard whacks of the clappers.

It's all rather unlikely and I am, of course, grateful for the opportunity
to ring on the bells as they are, but this is the first time I have seen a
possibility to address the complaint about the sound of the bells inside
the church.

John
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