Big Bore Raised Letter 5 Bell

[FS150HZ]

I took quite a while to come over from the now dead old Horn-Whistle board, though I finally arrived.

I'm unsure if a small bore to big bore K-5 bell mod has ever been done, but I imagine it has. Nonetheless, I figured a Raised Letter version would be a good experiment. I had owned a big bore 5 bell in the past, and the difference in seat bore depth between them and the small bore bells gave me confidence that I would be able to shim the bell enough to compensate for pitch drop from the larger bore.

The bell dropped somewhere between 40 and 50 cents after the throat was bored out. Sure enough, shimming the seat bore up a 10th of an inch was enough to rebalance the octave. It's still not quite as shallow as the vintage big bore 5 bell seat bores are either.

The throat itself initially was about 1.02" in diameter, and is now 1.35". That might even be slightly bigger than the old big bore 5 bell throats, but I went with that since the RL 3 and 4 throats progressively drop 0.05" in diameter. Continuing the pattern with the 5 bell made sense to me.

This RL 5 bell had the same notoriety as many of them do. It was overly loud and squeaky with extreme sensitivity to low volume. I'm a big dominant 5 bell fan though if the whole horn is balanced well, so I was not interested in restricting the 5 bell. I simply wanted a punchier sounding 5 bell without the overwhelming squeak and less responsiveness to low volume. While the first wish was guaranteed, the second was much more of gamble. It did pay off however, and the speaking pressure increased 10 pounds.

In this recording of the retuned RL K5LA it belongs to, the 4A bell is nearly as loud as the 5 bell. The 4A originally was the weakest, and this is unfortunately quite common with the RL variants. That likely contributes to the 5 bell's excessive voice on many RL 5 chimes. The 4A in this case was made louder by plugging the back cap bubble vent. The 5 bell did get slightly louder with the larger bore. Given how loud the 5 bell was to begin with though, the increase could only be so much, and it wasn't much at all.

The project did everything I hoped for though. If you're wondering why I haven't shown the bell shim, it's because it's not pretty. I'm always changing the tuning with my Raised Letter horns, so I just jam modeling clay in the seat bores. As for the machining marks in the throat, I'll be sanding that smooth in the future.

[epederson]

Wow that recording sounds sweet!