BELLS matters + TUNING MACHINES HELP!!!

Hi Tom,

One of the peculiarities of bell metal are the huge gas bubbles contained (to give you an idea…1cm diameter if you magnify the microscope 64 times). What kind of harmonicity do you expect from that? … The elasticity of bell metal (also called bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin) is great to produce a ringing tone that lasts for ages and its inharmonicity produces a nice timbre.

Bells have many pitches ringing above the fundamental and outside the harmonic series. An expert may be able to get close to the answer ... I guess any struck ideophone (struck solid body for the purpose of producing a sound) has an inharmonic nature whether is wood, glass, ceramic, metal, etc ... metal just happen to sustain the sound longer than the other materials ( never tried a glass bell though!) … bell metal is a mistery though, and I guess it was an accident somehow!

Whitechapel foundry in London tunes up to the 3rd partial for hand bells and up to the 5th partial for church bells. If the order is an English church bell they will tune to a minor third instead of a major, I guess they use whole number ratios rather than counting in hundred cents, but not sure. The tuning process consist of scraping metal inside the bell, I would guess at the nodal circles.

Whitechapel foundry has been producing bells (sticking to the tradition) since 1570, and is Britain’s older manufacturing company. They made the bell for the Big Ben and many Churches in America and Australia. If you want to know more about bells you should check their web page. They also would answer your questions by email.

www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/
bells@whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk

They also produce the most popular hand bells around, and are happy to tune them to the closest cent.

I do not work for them but they have a great customer service! … I would have worked for them 100 years ago when they tuners where paid by the pound of chippings they scrapped inside the bell! Haha!

Sincerely,

Tony Salinas

PS. By the way ... Is there a message or information about the latest electronic equipment for tuning machines around???

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--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Jose Antonio Martin Salinas
<jamsalinas@...> wrote:
>
> Is there a message or information about the latest electronic
equipment for tuning machines around???

I know a piano tuner who sometimes uses this program, and there's a
shareware version that you might be able to make work.

http://www.tunelab-world.com/

Clark

(something from a yardsale, http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c348/
mireut/w3.jpg)