Month-Going Longcase Clock Project Part 3 - Making a Bell Stand

Part of the restoration of the passing strike components involved replacing the missing bell stand. This is a shaped piece of steel that carries the bell.

Replacements are commercially available, and while they can look okay for certain clocks, the specific design needed for this particular clock means that it needed a custom stand. I prefer to make my own parts whenever possible, because I find that they look a lot nicer than factory made replacements.

Here's a typical mass produced replacement bell stand:



The first step in creating the bell stand is to find a suitable piece of steel, and cutting the blank. I use regular 3/4" x 1/8" steel bar stock from the hardware store. This is fairly mild steel, and it is easy to work with. The blank is cut using a hack saw. This short video shows how I cut the blank.



The rough-cut blank is then further shaped on a bench grinder, or alternatively, with coarse files.











The shape of the bell stand continues to be refined with smoothing files, and then eventually with sandpapers.









To round the stem portion, I begin by coarsely filing the corners, then filing those secondary peaks.









Once the bulk of the shaping has been done with the files, I switch to cloth-backed sanding papers, and I use this technique to round and polish the surface:



With 90% of the shaping and polishing done, I turn to the fitting of the bell stand to the movement. Normally a bell stand has a pointed teardrop shape that sits flat over the backplate, but this one has the style where the end of the tip turns into a locating hole in the plate. To form this hole, the blank is heated, and bent over an anvil.







The bulk of the excess metal is carefully filed away until the profile works with the plate holes. The screw hole will be cut last.



For the top of the stand, where the bell must sit, I use just a cross-shaped design that I came up with. This is a simple design, and it has worked well on the last bells stand I made. Not shown is the threading of the top. It is simply filed roughly into a cylinder, and threaded. A square brass nut is then cut, sanded, and tapped to match.











Here you can see the bell stand fitted to the clock plate.



You can also see the bell hammer, the bell stop piece (attached to the pillar), the hammer cock and a bit of the lifting piece. The hammer spring and spring pin had not yet been fitted.

Longcase - Small Repairs

A lot of the repairs that are needed on this particular clock are simple (and not-so-simple) solder repairs. Some a tricky, some could potentially be a complete nightmare, but so far, so good.

Let's start with the pendulum rod and rating assembly. This was one of the first things I tackled.

You may remember that it looked like this:



There are two repairs needed here. The broken rod (with the broken tip in the top of the rating assembly), and the severely bent threaded rod.

What most people would be tempted to do is to grab a pair (or two pairs) of pliers, and attempt to straighten the threaded rod. This could work, but it could also cause several problems. In the "best case scenario" this works fine, and the rod is once again functional. However, in the "worst case scenario" you could end up snapping the rod, or crushing/marring the threads. On items this old, it's always better to tread carefully.

I chose to heat the threaded rod with a torch until the steel was soft, and then simply bend it as best as I could, using the hole in my anvil as a leverage point. This left me with a very safe repair that insured the safety of the threads, and applied very little stress on the rod. The result is not a perfectly straight "good as new" repair, but the nut moves easily from top to bottom.



For the top of the assembly, I was lucky to find that a small portion of the threaded tip was still protruding, and it came out with almost no force. I chose to use hard solder (high heat silver solder) for this repair, since it will need to handle a fair amount of stress.

Another repair option would be to re-thread the end of the rod (since only 3/16" was broken off), but it's been my experience that the threading on these is almost always "non standard". In fact, I was going to flip the rod to have the soldered repair at the top, but the threading on the suspension spring block is not the same size. Silver soldering can be tricky to learn, but it is essentially the same as regular soldering. The only differences are that you need a special solder (I believe mine is borax based) and you need to be sure that both parts being jointed together are RED HOT. If the parts are not hot enough, the solder will not flow.

One of the drawbacks of high temperature solder is that on most items, you will completely discolour the metal(s) being fused. You will also want to make a very neat repair, since the cooled solder will need to be ground or filed off.

Here is the finished repair (sorry the camera was not quite in focus).





Another quick and easy repair was the bell stand. I was able to bend the break back 95% without having it snap off, and then I soldered the break with silver solder.

Here you can see the soldered joint before clean-up. You can see how darkened and discoloured the steel is, and the silvery-gold colour of the silver solder.



Once cleaned-up, the repair (especially in a crevice like this) is nearly invisible.



Another simple repair was fixing the light bend(s) in the crank key. The key is VERY sturdy, but I was able to bend the key with just hand pressure. This "repair" isn't that much of a repair, but it does make a noticeable difference.



The last little repair (so far) was this screw. This is one of the two screws holding the bridge piece for the hands (which is also broken, and will be discussed later). It appears to have been in use "as-is", but I wanted to try to repair it.

I have NO IDEA how someone managed to split a screw in a partial spiral down the centre, but I suspect it may have been an original defect in the steel.

I used regular (soft) solder for this repair.



You can still see the split, but I didn't want to use too much solder. The head of the screw was also repaired. When I see badly mangled screws, I usually take a few minutes to file-off the marks around the slot, and improve their look as much as possible.



The next post will cover the repairs to the clock hands.