Ryan McFarland

Tarnished bell

Originally uploaded by zieak

A few weeks ago we bought this brass bell at a garage sale. (I have it disassembled here to work on cleaning it up.) It was marked for $10 but we bought it with a pile of other things including some records which we got for $10 less than they were asking si it was kind of free.

Why would we want a bell like this? Well, in many bars there is a bell hung up. In Alaska, if you ring the bell you are buying a round for everyone in the place. My point? We bought a bar at a garage sale earlier. I’ll cover that later!

I started to clean up the bell using a brass polish recipe I found online. Salt, powdered laundry detergent, lemon juice, warm water… It did a good job smothing the bell but it didn’t remove the tarnishing. Today I started using sand paper to bring the bell back to life. It works better but my hands are cramping.

Writing blog posts from my cell phone isn’t really helping my hands relax though.