It wasn't too long after we relocated here to Virginia and Ruther Glen
when we set up our foundry that I found an article in the paper
that documented the work of the Jamestown archaeological team.
They found these three bell fragments that sort of piqued my curiosity
and there was some speculation that this once may have been from a bell
that was installed in one of the churches in the James Fort on the Jamestown site.
So I reached out to the archaeological staff in order to assist with their efforts
and trying to piece together the mystery of what this bell was,
where it came from, and how it was used.
Luckily from the fragments that were available,
we were able to utilize 3D scans from those fragments
and extrapolate the profile in order to reconstruct what the bell may have looked like.
These are 3d prints of those fragments
and we only have about three pieces of it
but as luck would have it these three pieces are rather significant to understand the bell
as it was designed, as it was made.
And so if you look at the mold that we have started here,
we've got the core made
—which is the inside of the mold—
and then this piece of material here is called the sweep.
These gauges are cut and designed from these pieces from the fragments that were discovered.
So you can kind of lay it on the mold
and kind of see how they fit together.
A little bit of terminology here.
So this is the core, as I said.
It's the inside of the mold.
And then the outside of the mold,
what you see here on this other mold that we're making,
is the cope.
So it is literally a two-piece mold.
You have a core and a cope.
They come together.
That space in between those two pieces of the mold are what you cast the metal into.
Each bell that we make utilizes two profiles:
one to make the core
and one to make the false bell to start making the outside of the mold.
This is the profile that was used to create that core
and then you take that profile off
and then you put the cope profile on.
The molding process begins by mounting the coarse trickle onto a molding platform
and basically using that as a gauge to make something fully in the round, 360 degrees.
And you build the core of the mold with loam,
which is a mixture of sand, clay, horse manure, hair, and reclaimed old molds
and so you mix that up into a mud-like consistency
and you basically mortar up a core with this gauge out of red brick and the loam.
So when you do that you sort of sweep up this section for the interior of the bell.
Then when that's done the core dries
and then you take that profile off of the molding platform.
You put the new profile on,
and this time, the forming edge still being on the inside of the strickle,
that establishes some gap in between the edge of the strickle that you're molding with
and then the outside sort of surface of the core.
That space will give you that sort of shape of what the future bell will be.
You need a pattern in a sense in order to take the other section of the mold from.
That piece, when we construct that, it's called the false bell
and it's so named because it is actually the future shape of the bell
but we just mold it up with more loam.
So it's basically we make a mud bell that sits directly on top of the core.
And then when that false bell or model is made it gets a very fine surface layer of wax.
That wax creates a nice skin for the future bell.
It also allows us to attach other sort of sections like the crown.
In this case most bells in the 17th century
and all the way back to the 13th century, 14th century,
most of them had crowns
—almost all of them had crowns.
It's entirely sort of sensible to believe that this one also had a crown much like this
with a looped argent and then six cannons that sort of radiated around the argent.
So that section was actually made separately in a loam-molded lost-wax section
that was then placed on top of the false bell that had a coat of wax
and then when basically that model or false bell was ready
you start brushing on more layers of finer loam to build the outside of the mold.
That section is called the cope.
Each of these sections is built directly on top of the last.
And so when the cope is made
—basically the same sort of thickness as the future bell,
in this case it was about an inch thick—
once that is made and dried, we put some other flasking around that cope section
and then ram it up in sand, sort of key everything together.
The mold is then heated up and the wax melts and retreats into the false bell
and that allows us to pull that cope section off of the loam model, that false bell.
So what you see is this sort of inside surface of the cope
that will create the outside surface of the casting.
So that's loam and then some of the sand
that's sort of flashed together in a mother mold.
And we prepped the interior surface of the cavity in this case with a graphite
and the false bell was destroyed.
We don't need it anymore because that's where the future metal will be.
And so we destroy the false bell and we reexpose the core
and we do some finishing touches to the core and finish that with a mold wash
and then put those two halves—the cope and the core—back together.
And then it's at that point that we take the mold to our casting area
and melt the bronze to around 2,000 degrees.
Depends on the size of the bell, but we melt it to about 2,000 degrees in a crucible.
I take the crucible out of the furnace
and then cast the bronze into the mold cavity.
Once that's done, the entire mold,
what we sort of labored over for weeks and weeks, is destroyed
and it's really great though because you get finally your bell that you work so hard for.
So we're really excited to be able to reconstruct this bell
and to hear and experience something
that the early settlers of the James Fort and Jamestown got to experience.
Now that the Jamestown bell is cast
—this being the exact shape and form of the earlier bell—
it is at a point where we can ring it
and we can hear what it sounded like to the early settlers of Jamestown.
I'm here with the Jamestown Rediscovery team here
and Michael, if you wouldn't mind, we could ring it
and listen to what it sounded like to the early settlers.
- On the outside?
- Yeah.
[bell ringing]