Hello anons. When we bought our house, it had a cute post-mounted bell, but the sellers took it with them. No problem, but since then I've wanted to find another one. My wife and I are having our anniversary at the end of the month, and today I bought an antique bell off a local fellow with the goal of restoring it by the end of the month as a surprise gift. This will actually be used, as we have three kids and some land so it will be great for calling the kids in for meals.All that gay context aside: How would you tackle this. I could go with an angle grinder and wire wheels to remove rust, but I think I'd fuck it up. Softer-metal wire wheels perhaps?. Other option is to drop it at a sandblasting shop. Or perhaps go at it with a random orbit sander? You tell me.After that, probably be priming it and painting with equipment enamel since it'll be out in the elements. It'll be attached to a 6x6 post that I mount atop a wood-to-concrete simpson bracket to keep the post out of the dirt, on top of a small poured footing. Maybe put a little sacrificial/decorative wrapper around the base to hide the bracket. I'll want the concrete footing fairly sturdy, I think, to withstand the fatigue of the back-and-forth motion the bell will experience, not to mention just its heavy ass weight at the top of a tall lever (the post).
>>2936910If your image is at all related, don't fuck up a good thing with needless future-proofing. The bell looks better like that than it would with whatever kind of goddamn paint on it. Any amount of surface treatment will spoil a perfectly good patina.Fix your aesthetics.
Angle grinder and wire wheel for 90% of it. Smaller wire wheel disc and cup brushes in a drill for the finer details and harder to get into places.
>>2936911Or this. Looks pretty neat as is. Or if you do clean it up consider just oiling it or doing some japanning type finish.
>>2936911sorry queer, it doesn't match my house's aesthetic. white mounting post, enamel black hardware and paint. POSSIBLY just oiling if it looks good once the lichen and rust are off, good suggestion >>2936914. Someone down the line can strip it off if they don't like it.
>>2936914Don't flatter a stranger without good reason while you provide bad advice. There's no good reason to recommend enameling when the bell looks fine as-is.>>2936916I'm pretty thankful to not be queer, and your aesthetic is as fragile as your temperament if you feel the need to remove that relatively attractive lichen. What's that lichen going to do to the bell? What's it doing to you? Will it slowly spread into a happy and beautiful thing, if you let it? Did you already chip some off? Think about the pattern: it's a nice, gentle curve, without any immediate demand for correction.
I wouldn't wire wheel or grind it at all. It doesn't look corroded, it just looks like it has a good patina coat that will protect it. I would just clean off the mold/fungus then coat it lightly with lanolin or something.If you really want to clean it completely then use acid or rust remover and a stiff bristle brush instead of grinding it off with power tools.
>>2936910As stated by others it looks good as is. But don't wire wheel brass you fuckwits. There is brass polish that you can buy that let's you just scrubb corrosion off easily. Wire wheeling will scratch the fuck out of the surface.
>>2936910>wirewheeling and painting a bellmight as well come to whirewheel and paint my coin collection while you are at it
>>2936922it's got "CRYSTAL METAL" and "No. 3" on it, plus some other stuff -- it is 100% a cast iron bell made by C.S. Bell Foundry of Hillsboro OH, not brass. A number of companies sell replacement parts, etc:https://www.prindlestation.com/iron-bell-repair-restoration-s/145.htmThat site recommends sandblasting and primer+enamel, but I thought I'd gather more opinions and ideas here before I did anything.
>>2936910I think your bell looks perfect the way it is. If anything id go at it manually with some steel wool or scotchbrite. It will develop patina again anyways.That being said I never did anything to a bell but I know that those things are not trivial. They don't sound right just by accident. So mess with it and you might end up messing with the tuning.
>>2936933>mess with it and you might end up messing with the tuningbingo, a big reason why I'm hesitant to really go at it with anything. #000 steel wool seems like a good and relatively gentle way to go at it and then maybe a wool polishing wheel and some oil.
>>2936922I've got a fucking bell you can polish faggot
>>2936922But don't wire wheel brass you fuckwits.Its not brass you fuckwit.
>>2936910pressure wash it then srub it with a stiff brush and tsp. its an iron bell not a fabrege egg
>>2936910there's almost no "rust" or corrosion on this at all. wash it with a pressure washer, use a #0000 steel wool and a bit of oil or very fine polish and go over the whole thing, and if you are still insisting on enamel painting it, then de-grease it with acetone completely before painting. This doesn't need sand/beadblasting or any power tools to strip that patina off.
>>2936941>>2936933>tuning>decorative belllmfaoIf >>2936928 is correct, it's not even bronze. The more I look at it, the more I think he's right. It doesn't look like bronze. It looks like it's been painted black and has moss/lichen growing on it. Definitely doesn't have the blue-green patina like the bronze bell in the courtyard of the church I work at.
>>2936910scrubbing brush and knock the lichen off it. A little worried about corrosion of the hanging bolt. Fish oil in there maybe. Or mount it over dirt so it won't break when it falls.
>>2936911just polish the brass
>>2936910>Softer-metal wire wheels perhaps?.if you want to get rid off the green rust, you can use muriatic acid. then polish. but remember that it won't stay shiny for long.
If it's cast iron, use evaporust and soak it for a day or so then scrub it with steel wool. When you take it out, rise it down, hit it with some mineral oil and stick it in the oven like seasoning a pan. Don't paint it. Alternatively get a media blaster and crushed walnut shells and have at it. It'll still weather though.
>>2936910>After that, probably be priming it and painting you can sand it, but not very hard.also, don´t paint it, because it will affect the resonating sound of it.i think it is made of copper or brass.well done you will keep the reptilians away at same time enhance your kids aura.the bell must be intact for it´s perfect sound, if it is,cracked, it´s better to melt it and made a new one.than to add another metal to it.
Well OP it's getting close to the end of the month, what did you do to restore the bell?
>>2940186Since it's for sure cast iron, I hit it with some brass wire wheel attachments on a drill, which did a good job at getting the grime off. It's actually already coated with a really tough black enamel paint, so that saves me some work. The brass wire wheels did basically nothing to the enamel. I also had a few spots with steel wool where the enamel had already worn off by other means. in in this photo it's just rubbed down with WD-40 as a rust prevent preventative while I'm working on it.I've got a tiny bottle of gold enamel paint that I'm going to very delicately put just over the lettering to make it pop, then I'm gonna hit the whole thing with some glossy automotive clearcoat.Fun fact. The fact that there is an ampersand in the "CS bell & Co." on the yolk means that this bell can be dated between 1882 and 1894. I did not expect it to be an actual antique of that age, so that's just a nice bonus.meanwhile, I've gotten the appropriate Simpson brackets and post and mounting hardware, I just need to get the hole prepared. I'm not sure if I can auger out the hole and pour concrete in secret without my wife suspecting anything so I may just present the bell as the gift and THEN mount the thing to save the headache of doing it stealthily. Haven't decided.
>>2940282sorry for shitty boomer text-to-speech. anyway, here is the eye bolt on which the bell hangs. The clapper hooks onto the eye. It looks like it is cast, so it's likely original. I I wouldn't think you'd cast a fastener. I would more expected to be forged, but the fact that there appear to be air inclusions in the threads makes me think it's a casting and not forged.
>>2940284>Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
>>2940382kek yes i had the exact same thought. was driving to the grocery store late at night with my dog to get some bran flakes, checked on my thread and needed to shitpost out loud while i drove. Anyway yeah it's actually a pleasant surprise that this thing is a genuine antique.For the lettering, I'm just going to do what the legend mymechanics did in pic related, with this paint:>https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004QJOAQQthen coat the whole thing in this:>https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001DKNSE6Will be on a white 6x6 atop this bracket that gets anchored to the concrete footer:>https://www.homedepot.com/p/Simpson-Strong-Tie-Outdoor-Accents-Mission-Collection-ZMAX-Black-Powder-Coated-Post-Base-for-6x6-Nominal-Lumber-APB66/300066053
>>2940393was browsing around for inspiration and saw pic related, and the idea of hanging planter baskets or other cutesy bullshit like a windchime is exactly something she would go for so I'll also put these on the sides:>https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V3689B2and then let her pick what we hang from them. they just got delivered and I can't decide whether they'll look disproportionate or not, but it's whatever.
>>2936910Don't touch it with a wire wheel, the scratches will fuck up the sound. Nylon wheel is the hardest you should go, and I'd probably just use a niggercookie (Clean-strip-disk if you're living in the cucked states) on it.Then some burned linseed oil (like you'd season a pan), and it'll look like new.
>>2940407>Don't touch it with a wire wheel, the scratches will fuck up the sound.Bullshit. Wire wheels are about as gentle as you can get on steel and cast iron. Unless you are hitting a sharp corner they don't remove material or even scratch anything up other than removing the surface rust... Now on aluminum or other softer metals you would have a point.
>>2936910Its brass. Why dont you polish the wver living fuck out of it so its nice and bright. Buy some polishing shit that attaches to a drill and go to town.Though, I wonder if there's a chemical solution that you could just soak it in to expedite the process. Some chemist guy would probably know how to do that.
>>2940491>>2936910Avoid metal wire wheels as the brass is relatively soft.. you may cause pitting.
funny i was wrong, it's actually cast STEEL, which is wild. gold enamel paint looks so good.
>>2940732Its much large
>>2940732looking nicei like it
with some powerpoint engineering and the magic of the golden ratio i have my target measurements to cut and place the post. Everything in the image is to scale. This is a raised back deck, 25" off the ground. The top measurement there (112.5) is to the underside of the beam supporting the roof over the deck. Will be perfect for her to reach out over the railing to ring it to call the kids in.
>>2940918Placement should take into account direction you want the sound to travel. You should use a rope to actually ring it.
>>2940934very fair but not relevant in our particular case, we don't have some giant ranch just a couple acres, and the back deck is facing straight out to where the kids will be roaming.plus, the nice thing about using the wood-to-concrete bracket instead of burying the post in the dirt is that it'll be far easier to relocate in the future, i'll just have a blank spot of concrete on the ground to figure out a use for kek. Will try to make the footing itself somewhat pretty to account for that possibility.anyway, got the post cut to length and drilled out, and a couple light coats of clear on all the parts of the bell. doesn't look AS rich and glossy as with the WD-40, but I think it just needs a couple more coats. basically all that's left is to dig the hole and pour the concrete. Will do it this weekend when she's out of town with her sister.
>>2940494This phenomenon is so funny but annoying and sadly rampant.
>>2940971the phenomenon of anons not reading the fucking thread and just spouting definitively "it's brass. it's brass."? yeah, i agree - funny, sad, annoying, rampant
>>2940979But it looks like its brass. I just assumed the other anons were retarded.
tonight's the night
>>2941735poured at midnight. now i get to stay up until it's time to edge it.
>>2941801ALMOST forgot the fuckin J bolt. It's 12" long, I put black sharpie around the threads at the 1" mark to make sure that's all that was protruding; exactly the length needed for the nut/washer/plate stackup
>>2941801>now i get to stay up until it's time to edge it.Lol. You're edging it.
>>2941804well, I was at Lowe's getting the concrete this evening and this seemed like as good an excuse as any to get an edgerokay. now i sleep.
fit check. sweet. concerete isn't strong enough to actually mount anything yet though.
big success today. in-situ photos later.
>>2941969way to dunk on the retards anon, nice job
>>2940407>>2940491>>2940494Reading comprehension is not your strong suit you dense fuckers. OP already cleansed the fucking thing.
>>2941969Gibs video of it going ding-a-ding-a-ding
>>2941801>now i get to stay up until it's time to edge it.>>2941804>You're edging it.>>2942018>Gibs video of it going ding-a-ding-a-dingOh yes! Oh yes! Oh my lawd, I'm gonna wring my bell!!!
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