GPO Bell - 56E

[FABphones]

This is a first - I don't post in the 'discussions about anything made of wood' section as I don't buy wood, but a couple of joblot boxes arrived and this old wooden GPO 56E bell was in one of them.

With a wooden base and a metal cover, this is one of the early versions so I'm very pleased to have found it in there. Most of these seen for sale are later and made of plastic:

http://www.britishtelephones.com/bell56.htm

Wood not my thing but this little bell was also originally used with a HES so it will be connected to our HES when it gets installed (future project).

The wood had a bit of cream gloss paint (the usual, from where it was once painted around insitu) which was lightly sanded away. I don't like to do too much to wood. The varnish on this was missing in some places but I didn't want to re-varnish and make it look like new so it just had a coloured wax applied to tidy it up and give the wood a feed (where possible).

The metal cover had signs of corrosion on the paint which was just starting to come through so needed a bit of attention and received a repaint (hope I did the right thing there, I wasn't sure whether to leave the paint as was and treat then clean). The gong itself and the hammer were fairly tidy. These were cleaned (with Brasso/000 on the hammer) and then polished with Polishing Paste #5.

Photos:

[twocvbloke]

Nice little ringydingypingythingy there, so far the only bells I have are the 50x series bellsets...

[HarrySmith]

Cleaned up nicely!