I had a plan to build and test this machine for one season and then refine it ahead of the next winter.
2 weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and solve a serious problem, our bell ropes had gotten very stiff, so stiff, they not only hurt your hands when ringing, but also become quite dangerous. When the weather is damp, they draw in moisture and contract slightly, but also do not drop down nicely into a loop near your feet. For example, this can happen!
This not only means that taller people have to avoid poking their own eyes out with the end, but that everyone is trying to not have this rigid thing flap about. (Did I ever say ringers were never a bit rude just for a laff every so often?) A lot of learning ringers hence struggled to keep the rope under control and it becomes one more barrier to learning. As well as a temptation to swordfight with the ropes, which itself is super dangerous with nearly a tonne of bell metal on the other end, but it's damn crazy that a rope can defy gravity that much.
The Recipe
So here-with the basics of my ropewarmer 2025.
40-50watt bulb generates enough heat if left on for 4 hours on a timer.
Details
OK, so here is more on how to build one yourself, it probably took me around 8 hours to get something I was happy with.
- I learned that if you bang the thing while the bulb is on, the bulb easily blows. I only had a very small selection of filament type bayonet and eddison-screw bulbs in the garage. I thus rebuilt it many times using different ES and BC bulb types I could find until I found that it is easy to get incandescent bulbs off amazon of the variety you want. You have to type "incandescent bulb" into the search.
- This is the Mk III, because it originally had a dimmer switch, but I discovered that the dimmer is just one more electrical safety thing to add and one more thing to go wrong by leaving it permanently switched on. Getting this to pass a PAT test was also going to be hard if the dimmer was obviously part of it, I could build my own dimmer, or just drop the dimmer entirely.
- If you have a bulb over 50W you will need a dimmer, so just go for a 40W bulb.
- You only need a simple timer. A complex timer to come on at different times for different weekdays and practices that are in the evening, is over-kill. In reality it is the mornings that matter. For us that is Saturday training and Sunday service ringing. The timer used is thus 24hour, not weekly. Drying the ropes out a bit on every day of the week is hardly going to be a problem with the low power consumption.
- We started with 4 hours in the morning from 5am till 9am.
- Be sure to add a sturdy grid inside the tube above the bulb to stop the ropes getting any anywhere remotely close to the bulb. That's just a recipe for disaster, you want at least 6 inches gap there.
A few more pics showing the construction.
cutting a wide enough base for the warmer was simple
4 angle brackets, remember to knot
the cable to prevent it pulling out
a quick check
ignore the dirty floor
- Waste pipe comes in 3 meter lengths. In the end I cut to 1.8 meters, a lot of waste, I used the waste to make a inner-sleeve or join, which you can see here. To make that inner sleeve, it is easier to cut the tube using a multi-tool if you have one. Cut about 15mm away if your tube is the same as mine, and then slice more out as you go until it is small enough to make an inner sleeve.
- Do not PVC weld the sleeve in, you will need to be able to put a sturdy grid in above the sleeve somehow. The walls of the tube are pretty thick, but that sleeve was not hard to convince.
- Any screws, like those to hold the sleeve need to be short and trimmed off to not create sharp edges inside there.
- I used M4 hex bolts , 100 long to hold the angle bracket base together.
- Do not make the tube too long, or else it will be a struggle to get it up the stairs.
- Ensuring that the warmer just fits underneath the spider will help slightly as well.
- Think about cable strain relief.
- Fit a 3A plug fuse, you don't need anything higher than that. I used a 10A "appliance" 2 core cable, so I should be safe on that account.
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