Ringing Forums

Hello Alison, being someone that has NPTC C&G Qualifications in Arboriculture, I can confirm that trees suffering from Ash dieback also have a discolored or brown/black stem. The timber goes a brown/black from the center of the stem and works its way out.
If trees are too badly infected with disease, it is not recommended to climb them to dismantle unsfate trees as they have no spring to them and will just drop limbs, the advice is to just fell them. The timber becomes very brittle and means you need to vary felling cuts to ensure it falls in the intended direction.
This will no doubt have an effect on the Ash market and what is available as a replacement for ringers going forwards.

Changing the subject slightly, if you didn't know anything about the stay/slider mechanasim and were given the requirements of the roles of the stay, would anyone come up with anything different, or is the stay/slider a very elegant and relatively cost effective solution to the problem that couldn't be bettered?

I suppose you could do it with electronics and magnets, but that wouldn't be better necessarily and it definitely wouldn't be cheaper.

Accepting the slight change of subject, many would argue that the Hastings design is a much better engineering solution. Difficult to set up maybe, but much less clunky and requiring much less maintenance. Talking about arguing, a good game when a group of ringers are in the pub is, quite innocently, to say "what do you think about Hastings stays?". I guarantee that some of them will still be there arguing when everyone else has gone home.

We’ve recently run out of stays and the husband of one of the ringers suggested larch. I don’t know if anyone else has used larch?

We did exactly as Alsion implies - one of our ringes was in a position to 'requisition' a diseased ash tree whern it was felled and arranged for the trunk to be sawn into 1 metre lengths and then split into board of approx 3inches (75mm). After storage for several months the boards were split in into blank stays and then planed to the correct dimensions. The result - we have up to half a dozen spare stays for the bells most likely to suffer damage and a couple each for the tenors and trebles. They should outlast my lifetime!

There are a number of products on the market made from recycled polymers - e.g. garden furniture. Whilst these materials have no cellular structure equivalent to wood, they are often able to be worked in very similar ways. The required properties for stays are known - surely it would not be beyond the wit of (wo)man to test bats of such modern materials with the view to finding a sufficiently close equivalent to ash?

because recycled plastic is unsuitable for the job. It sags under load (recycled plastic benches often have steel reinforcement in them) and it tends to bend rather than snap cleanly. Ash is eco-friendly and if not subject to abuse, can last for centuries.

Here's the effect on a slider of a combination of the wrong material being used for a stay (tropical hardwood) and smearing everything with grease, which mixed with stone dust coming down from the steeple:

I agree in principle with your points, which relate to a lot of "products". I wonder, though whether there is much difference in the degree of protection afforded to the bell etc. If the stay breaks the bell will continue the unwanted over-rotation. If the stay bends before failure the shock of the bell's retardation would be lessened and the ringer's experience of the event would be less violent. I surmise that the effect could be likened to the crumple zone of a car. Whilst recycled plastic bags might not be suitable, there is a huge variety of "plastic" out there, with a wide variety of properties. Is there a bell-ringing polymer engineer out there who could consider this?

most likely what would happen is the plastic would bend and jump over the slider, and the bell would go over anyway. It's the continued rotation of the bell that's violent, not the stay breaking, as anyone who has been unfortunate enough to make "the last tap" on an already cracked stay will tell you.

As anyone who has rung on sprung steel stays will attest, the flexibility makes setting the bell feel very odd, I think plastic would be similar. Plus the tendency of plastic to gradually deform under load means it would be unsafe to ever leave bells with plastic stays rung up.

I don't understand what you think the benefits over over ash would be.

Thanks, John. Since becoming a broken stay perpetrator some years ago I've been curious that ash has remained the preferred choice in the modern era. Whilst it is certainly resilient, its flexibility is not as uniform as we like to believe and a (visual only) comparison of a number of new spare stays some time ago showed an unexpected and potentially significant variance in the grain. Whilst that is expected in a natural material, that visible variance suggested to me that the performance of otherwise seemingly identical stays might also be variable. With regard to potential alternative materials, I'm neither able to suggest a specific material nor am I desperately searching for one, but it does seem to me that something more flexible than ash would reduce the potential adverse effects on bearings etc of bells being heavily set.

As Mike says 'wood being a natural material does vary in quality and strength. Generally the recommendation for ash stays is that they should be preferably sourced from UK stock and be straight grained along the length of the stay. Ash die back is gaping to present a problem in the future, however at present it is still possible to get good quality ash for stays. As the actual consumption of stays is so low, I cannot see that anyone outside the ringing fraternity are going to carry out the necessary research as to which alternative material could be used. I note the suggestion of a plastic, but thought we were trying to get away from using plastics in the environment?

John, In my experience of using ash more for other purposes than stays, I did in the past find that architectural use of ash posed problems insofar as the inability of a designer to obtain calculations for its performance-in-use. (Such calculations are available for a number of timbers in architectural use and are required to be presented alongside the proposed designs for Building Regulation approval). The data for oak, larch, etc can be used to inform decisions NOT to use these for stays, yet, as far as I'm aware, there is no equivalent data supporting the use of ash for stays, although we are all perfectly happy with it's continued use based upon several centuries of satisfaction. For those who are having difficulty sourcing good ash it would be nice to have the confidence to use an alternative wood. However, trying to kill two birds with one stone, I felt that in a world where making greater use of reclaimed / recycled "plastic" is urgent, perhaps stays would be a good use of such a material. Sorry for any confusion.

Isn't there a novel new design for the stay/slider mechanism at St Clements Cambridge?

Yes, there is. It was mentioned in the talk at the ART conference in Birmingham earlier this year.

We have done a little more searching and can see that there are some other woods that have rather similar mechanical properties to ash, at least considering the properties that are likely to be of concern if making and using a stay.

Beech and hornbeam may be appropriate - Bearing in mind the lack of precision with which stays may be made and the variability in timber samples I can’t see that small differences in properties as quoted for different timbers would be significant.

Has any one tried beech or hornbeam? Beech certainly can grow with long straight grain without any knots - that is essential. Larch (mentioned earlier) is probably less suitable - it is softer and often grows with frequent branching so likely to have knots

Has any one tried beech or hornbeam — Alison Hodge

When I was CUG steeple keeper in the 1960s I had to buy some stays. I asked for ash but the wood yard hadn't got any and gave me beech as an alternative. I don't know whether the breakages were more or less tan they would have been with ash though.

St Clements Stays are glass fibre. The design was trialled at Great St Mary's and has yet to break and so far so good at St Clements. The ringing centre is being used to teach a lot of Ring for the King learners so the stays are getting a good test.

There is clearly no magical properties to ash its just a tradition, what matters are the mechanical properties of flexibility, fatigue and fracture resistance. However if you plot the variability of different types of wood (available from US variant of the forestry commission) you find ash is a pretty consistent wood and hence safe to use, other woods, such as some softwoods, have a lot more variability so they may work or they may not,

Fifty years ago I mader a stay from laminated plywood. It broke rather easily, probably because it wasn't very good quality plywood. For a while I have had it it mind to try again using good quality birch plywood, which I have some experience of using in other applications. It is available in a range of thicknesses, which would allow stays of various thicknesses to be made, but buying several sheets would be quite an investment so I haven.t tried it yet.

In the meantime I have a local,sawmill which can supply fresh sawn ash at a price which allows Gay's Stays to remain competitive. I have sold a hundred stays since last October

For the more technical I plotted Modulus of Rupture versus Modulus of Elasticity in the form of a material selector chart. Birch was 'better' than ash, Walnut, beech and larch were OK but very small samples which is not great for looking at variability. The 'might be better,' 'might be worse' categories included Oak, Maple, Elm and Pine, although pine had a massive variability you would have to be a very good wood selector to use that.

I imagine that birch ply will probably have different properties from solid birch.

" . . . it would be nice to have the confidence to use an alternative wood" - Mike Shelley.

But please don't waste your time and effort using mahogany! A tower in our region acquired a stack of 'offcuts' from a local furntiture factory and (predictably) they snapped like match sticks!

I suggest the problem isn't so much stays that snap like matchsticks (aside: who uses matches nowadays?) but stays that are so strong they don't break and defeat the idea that the stay is a 'weakest link' to prevent damage to other parts of the installation (mainly bearings, I guess).

Robin may well be correct! But so long as the ratio of stays / gudgeons is heavily weighted on the side of broken stays, then they may be considered to be doing their job!

Having worked as a structural engineer, I can confirm that plywood has very different characteristics than the original timber it was made from, partially because of the direction of the grain changes with every ply and partly because of the characteristics of the adhesive used.

stays that are so strong they don't break and defeat the idea that the stay is a 'weakest link' to prevent damage to other parts of the installation — Robin Shipp

Here's an example of what happens if you use a tropical hardwood stay; its continual
pounding on the slider turned it into shredded wheat. And the liberal coating of grease on the runner board when mixed with stone dust from the steeple didn't help either.

I recall from many years ago being advised to apply blacklead such as 'Zebrite' - (looks like black toothpaste!) - to the slider rails to reduce friction and ease the movement. I wonder if this is still considered good practice?

I would advise not applying anything like a paste to the slider as that will simply collect stone dust and other debris from the tower. This will create what is effectively a grinding paste that will wear the slider and certainly not reduce the friction.

The problem is that graphite paste tends to get everywhere. The surface of our bells have been affected by pollution (mill town), in the past they'd have been black leaded, nowadays to get the same finish bellhangers use blackboard paint, which is what is on ours.

that's exactly what happened to the one above, the slider was ground down to about half it's thickness. I have put a thin layer of hard wax on the new ones (a quick rub with a candle) which doesn't collect any grit, but I'm not sure it made any appreciable difference.