Ringing Forums

Is it worth having a chat to the tower captain about it on the quiet. For one of the reasons you come is to ring the back ones and you also like hearing a true ring of bells being rung. Whilst you're not a local you need to be sympathetic to the rest of the band, but if you're making a good contribution to their practice and making the difference towards things then that might help. It might also help to suggest it would be good to work towards getting the local band up to 8 bell ringing over the next 6 months and see what the TC says. It might be that the TC is inexperienced on 8 and feels out of their depth so there's possibly some encouragement to do there too.

The plastic pulleys for bell installations are bespoke for the application and you're not going to find them in a general industrial suppliers product catalogue.
The majority of them are the Whitechapel design with twin bearings on a 1/2" bolt from the 1970s, which are 1.5" or 2" wide, along with a variety of diameters from 5" up to 8". If you get the right size, they're all interchangeable from the current suppliers (Whites/Nicholsons/Higby) as they all use the same design of fitting, but some are lighterweight than others, the lighter ones the better.

There was an era where Eayre and Smith were supplying plastic pulleys to slightly different dimensions to those listed above (they were narrower) and sometimes they even fitted plain bush bearings. These are no longer available and are either require a new pulley box or a timber one being turned up bespoke.

Unsuccessful? It would seem that the CCT blocking of it has been successful so far given the project (according to Dove's guide) appears to have not gone ahead, but certainly, the supporting information provided will prove to be very useful for any projects where Planning Permission and Listed Planning Consent is required. There certainly seems to be more information provided than a typical faculty for a bells project.

15/12/22 update.
Thank you to everyone (bellringers and the CCCBR) that has offered and provided assistance with this, as this benefits all bellringers nationwide. Collectively we have managed to pull together sufficient evidence to support the case that there is a precedence on grants being paid for mail-order bell ropes that are NOT fitted by a VAT-registered contractor. The evidence has been reviewed by the LPWS and also the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) who have agreed that grants for bell ropes will continue to be paid where they are supplied mail order and fitted by volunteers.

Should any grants have been declined since July 2022 on the basis they were not fitted, I would encourage you to speak to your PCC treasurer and the LPWS team in Leicester to revisit your claim.

We have put more information on our website https://www.avonropes.co.uk/vat.html

Yes. The rules around gift aid can be a bit funny, like with going to a national trust property, you have to pay 10% more than the normal entry price for the whole of your entry fee to qualify for Gift aid and it has to be to a registered charity (which the most BRFs are, but the Associations
are not) but generally if it's made as a donation with nothing in return I believe it qualifies, so the £12 to the general fund could qualify.

St Mary's Chester are currently having some work done to their bells and they too are a local authority church, so would guess a conservation officer is involved there too.
Peterstone Wentloog (Priv ownership) are having minor works done to them as a result of being unrung for 20+ years and the building now in new ownershiop, the church there is currently awaiting on planning permission (and probably listed building consent) for full conversion into a domestic dwelling and no doubt they have a conservation officer on board with the works. The Newport ringers are probably the best point of contact there as they seem to be involved with the minor works to the bells.

Have you thought about speaking with Matthew Higby? About 10 years ago he rehung the bells in the Lord Mayor's Chapel in Bristol? It's a Bristol City Council building with nothing to do with the diocease and no doubt a conservation officer was involved there.

Muffles seemed to be fine to recover the VAT on them. I have that in writing from the current administrators of the LPW Scheme, but bell ropes seem to fall into the category of a bell or bell frame which seems to require them to be fitted. It is to the extreme that you could pay your local VAT-registered electrician to fit them, and claim the VAT back on his charge too!

The G&B is pretty restrictive over what it gives grants for too. Whilst they give a headline 20%, they only focus on bells and bell fittings, anything else that permits the bells to be rung is not eligible despite the fact that most of it will need to be done to be a successful centre of ringing and learning, e.g. new lighting, decoration, new ladders to get to belfry, new louvers for weatherproofing, sound control, tower steps, handrails, ringing galleries, all excluded.

Leaving the money in the branch is great, but the other added thing about leaving it in the branch is that it's not eligible for gift aid...and yet pretty much all of the £15 could be eligible for gift aid if it was given the BRF...at an extra 25%!! If only the restrictions for giving money were loosened and likewise the percentage of "eligible" project costs given might decrease, there would be little need to keep money in the branch and more benefits realised. A lot of ringing associations are extremely tight with their money and spend hours debating even the smallest sums, yet in the real world, the money changing hands is a pittance.

please. As like your case, it's normally the ringers that generally do most of the fundraising and co-ordination of these things and the treasurers who do the claims, the evidence will need to come from the treasurer to LPWS, but if you could check if that's the case, then this will be good evidence to support the fact they are not fitted. You could also include in the statement that whilst the ropes were supplied by a VAT registered contractor who had done extensive works to your bells and bell frame, the church recovered the VAT on all of the works including the bells ropes, despite them being fitted locally by you/bellringers as volunteers.

This is an ideal case. Do you have access to the information to show that they received the LPWS grant for the VAT element, and together with it a statement saying that you fitted them yourselves? I don't need to see the information but would ask for your contact details to point the LWPS current admin team in your direction to provide the information directly to them along with your statement

the £1000 limit is across all eligible expenditure, so can be invoices from multiple contractors providing eligible goods and services. Also, once in a 12-month period, you can put in a claim below £1000, providing it's above £500.

I would like to focus on bell ropes in the first instance and would like the references towards evidence to support the claim that they've not been fitted before but LPWS have previously paid those grants. Certainly, as Stays are part of a bell fitting, and the caveat is that they need to be fitted by a VAT registered contractor, that would be very much the case as we stand at the moment, however, bell ropes don't require tools to be fitted and are very much like fitting car mats designed for your car.

A lot of ringers and towers like to compare towers locally to them to determine whether they are charging the right fee, or not. Is this the right way to do it? Unless one tower makes a change to their fees, the fees will never be raised without someone stepping out of line.

Is it not better for each church to do an assessment of the out-of-pocket expenses and reasonable rate of pay for the time, including traveling and waiting time for the skills provided, and base it around that?

The following document gives a "national all-occupations hourly wage" (2019) of £13.21/hr, then if you require parking, public transport or driving your own vehicle (which HMRC deem £0.45/mile is a fair rate for the last eleven years) for someone to get to the church, including their time traveling. Most weddings ringing after only take about 1.5 - 2 hours out of someone's day.

https://www.powertochange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Value_of_Volunteering_Working_Paper_Final.pdf

This then needs to incorporate the local situations and availability of ringers, some churches may struggle to get ringers, combined with how much should go into the tower bell fund. For a lot of churches, weddings are probably the main income for the tower.

We need to bear in mind that for sole traders/self-employed with profits below £1000 a year, there is no requirement to register for self-assessment with HMRC, so non-registered ringers can be 'paid' for ringing without having to declare it - I'm sure there's a lot more to the HMRC rules too.

The end result comes round to how much we and the wider society values bellringing, and it's not something I personally believe we should be under-valuing.

Is £30 a rope 'after-only' a fair rate at today's prices plus one or two ropes worth to the tower fund? I know there are some places charging/paying more than that, but perhaps their local circumstances have higher expenses, or they value their time higher.

The outer casing on a typical Dyneema braid on braid rope is made from polyester. It's there very simply for the protection of the Dyneema core and better handling characteristics. There are a couple of options, you can get a new polyester cover to put over the Dyneema core, or remove the entire polyester cover throughout the rope. It really depends on how it has worn through and how you can finish it at the splice above the sally. Has it been catching on something?

In my experience, some of the ropes I've supplied that have been on over 10 years, with a lot of ringing on them are still absolutely fine.

The company I run is called Avon Ropes Ltd.

There are a couple of suppliers of dumbbells. Matthew Higby makes a steel-wheeled one which quite a few towers have versions of it and St Peter Mancroft in Norwich have a set of 8 with differing sizes of weights on them for their training centre to make them feel more like a real ring of bells. The advantage of these is that they can be mounted in your clock/intermediate chamber, or bolted to the bell frame - they're much more weather resistant than other suppliers. The Higby design uses a standard size (~4ft 6") steel wheel both the flywheel effect of the weight of the wheel rotating combined with the weight on the wheel to create the effect of a ~3cwt bell and as a result it has a reduced loading requirement on the building it is in, although it is very good for training and teaching people, it isnt a subsitute for a real bell which does subtly feel different, although it is better than those which use smaller wheels..

Saxilby simulators have about a 3ft/1m diameter wheel and I'm pretty sure there are a few rings of these around, I think Exeter (cathedral?) has a set of 10 of these. They look good, and I think the wheels are made of steel weights and MDF, so would suit a weathertight loft space rather than being fixed to a bell frame with open louvers. These are good if you have space restrictions, e.g. in your loft at home, or want to get the mobile tower they supply to take the bell to shows or other towers.

I'm sure most of the bell hangers have and do supply them too. Whites have supplied a full sized steel wheel light weight one for the Cheltenham Minster part of their project, but I would rate the Higby ones being better for realism, but I'm sure Whites could, or might now offer a better version. I'm sure the other bell hangers have done them, but Matthew Higby's design seems to be very popular.

I have attached a photo of the dumb bell at Leeds Minster in their clock room. It runs on an old cast iron headstock and has some cast iron clock weights bolted to it to simulate the weight of the bell. I don't know who made this, but I suspect it could be a couple of locals who put it together rather than a professional. This is probably better again at mimicking a real bell, it uses a weight that is very close to the weight of a real bell on real fittings. (I've not rung it)

There's 3 distinct avenues and I guess it depends what you're looking for;

• a smaller than normal size installation that's portable and could go into a loft space
• a full size wheel with light weight utilising the flywheel effect to mimic real bells
• a full size wheel with a heavy weight giving the weight and characteristics of a real bell.

The second two points are the type that most bell hangers would offer. The teaching centre at Worcester Cathedral has 8 all made locally by members of the band which are a hybrid with MDF(?) full sized which give a bit of the flywheel effect wheels and a heavy weight.



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With the greatest respect to most electricians that do valuable work in churches, most, if not all are not lighting designers and not skilled in the selection of light fittings, just like the ringers and the clients (PCC). Whilst electricians have the experience of putting light fittings in, they are rarely the ones that look at or use them so generally do as instructed on the back of their purchase order from the PCC.
The cause of flicker is generally the lighting rectifier circuit within the driver behind the LEDs and its ability to smooth out the ripple on the rectified AC mains voltage to generate DC. Whilst LEDs are common in everyday life nowadays, the ones without flicker are more likely to be the professional products that come with a much better LED driver at a much higher capital cost. One of the big advantages of professional fittings is that they have a lot more literature about them and can provide flicker-free assurances or a quantifiable amount of ripple. The cheaper LEDs won't have been tested, and are likely to have a ripple many times worse than the ones that have been tested.

I have come across a couple of ringing chambers at towers that have not long been re-hung, where the lighting level is akin to "restaurant mood lighting" at best. There seems to be an underestimation of the amount of lighting required.

From a technical perspective, as it is the driver at fault in these LEDs causing the flicker, it is entirely practicable if the LED fittings allow their internal one to be bypassed, to fit a much better driver upstream, or local to the LED fitting. Some of the professionals LED drivers will output 230, or even up to 300VDC, which would mean you could drive the fitted (mains powered) LEDs direct from another driver without any work to them, and the rectifier circuit within will never see an oscillating AC supply. I have not looked into the cost of this, but I suspect the professional quality LED drivers could be greater than the cost of some of these LED light fittings that are suffering from flicker.

I've PM'd you

Hello Barbara, There are one or two people that are ringers, and have worked in the trade that do project management/coordination. The main person that springs to mind is Andrew Higson, his company is called Exaudite http://www.exaudite.co.uk/ and is probably worth a discussion with him. He has managed a number of bell restoration projects, including the new ring of 12 in Cheltenham. He would also help with understanding your requirements and adjusting the works required from the different contractors before your PCC places the orders with them.

In a world where a lot of church and bell-ringing projects are entirely lead by volunteers, anyone charging a fee relating to their time to a project appears expensive. As you have also alluded to, the PCC finds it rather time-consuming to be managing projects and pushing them through, and isn't this something that you'd be tasking your paid professional to undertake? Everyone's time is proportional to a value of money, even if the time is given for free, in real terms there's a value to put to it. Rather than look at the hourly rate or fee the professional is looking to charge, why not consider the outputs they will achieve in that time with their the suite of skills they have bringing projects together? They are bound to add value to your project and even raise or consider things that you may overlook.

If it were a paid professional, like an architect, would they too have issues with getting contractors to get back to them, is it the history the church has with local contractors that means they are not interested?

What you've identified is a level of scope in your project, managing various suppliers/subcontractors which you believe could save you money if you have the time/skills to undertake it, whilst taking on the risk of it not all going swimmingly. If you were to let the entire project to the main contractor, who then subs it out, the main contractor has to do all that project management and interfaces, generally which they will build into the costs somewhere, so it's not free for them to undertake it. As part of a paid professional undertaking the management of the project, they'll often add a mark-up percentage to the subcontract values, and/or book a fixed fee for the project. The issue that most bell-hanging projects have with this, is that Ringing Association/Guild grants don't always provide grants for the overheads managing the project, even though they're essential to the success of the project - they'll often only provide a grant for the hardware element only.