Bell Restoration: Giving new life to old bells

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So you have some old sleigh bells. You may have acquired them at an auction, flea market or antique store or inherited a treasured family heirloom. Regardless, the bells are probably dirty and dingy and the old leather strap is most likely in rough shape or even completely gone.

We can clean and polish your bells, design and construct a new bell strap using historically accurate methods, and replace any missing or damaged bells with bells from our large inventory. We do not use a "one size fits all" approach to this work -- every restoration project is a "one of a kind" assignment in our workshop.

Fall-Winter workload: To deal with with our heavy holiday workload, we put all all custom projects received after about September 1st on hold until after the holidays. We resume working on custom orders in mid January. Projects are completed in the order in which they were received, so a project sent to us in September will be at the top of our work schedule, and one sent in December will be at the tail.

In a hurry? 1. Read our Quick Start Guide. 2. Fill out a Custom Order Worksheet. 3. Ship your bells, a down payment, and the completed Worksheet to us. When we receive your bells, we will contact you to discuss the details.

Box of antique sleigh bells and their original strap waiting for restoration

Steps in a restoration project

Here are the general steps to restore a typical set of antique sleigh bells:

To get started, you should:

• Decide in general what you would like to do with the bells and with the bell strap. We will be glad to visit with you at this stage if our website does not answer your questions or concerns
• Get to know us as real people and learn about our qualifications to do this type of work
• Contact us by phone or email to discuss your project in detail and request a cost estimate. If you have more than a brief question or two, a phone call will probably be more helpful and efficient than email
• Fill out a Custom Order Worksheet
• Make a down payment
• Send your bells to us

We will do our best to:

• Provide useful information on this website to help you make good decisions
• Visit with you about your bells on the phone or by email
• Provide an estimate of the cost
• Provide an estimated ship date


• Notify you when your bells arrive at our workshop
• Ask any questions we might have before we start work
• Write up a work order with your contact information and a description of the project
• Clearly identify your bells during storage and processing
• Handle your bells in a careful and responsible way
  
  
• Remove the bells from the strap as needed
• Clean, polish and lacquer the bells, as needed
• Design and construct the new bell strap(s)
• Install the bells on the new strap(s)
• Notify you when your bells are ready to be returned

To complete the project:

• You should make final payment when the work is done
• We will ship your finished bell strap(s) and any strap fragments or unused bells back to you
• If you find any problem with our workmanship or materials, we ask that you allow us to honor our guarantee to fix any errors