I once lived in an old house with a porch that had been enclosed with a new steel-clad door. I just happened to have a pair of ornate Victorian cast brass door knobs in my spare-stuff box. I figured installing these beauties on the new exterior door would make the door look a little more like it matched the house. I went to work attaching the old knobs to a new lockset. This meant I had to machine a new custom axle, adapting the doorknobs to the new lockset. I bought a pair of brass rosettes and with some machining and soldering, adapted them to the new lockset. I put together the precise thickness of washers needed to make the knobs fit to the door and rosettes. I polished the knobs. After perhaps 20 hours of work, I had the smoothest operating, most precise-fitting knobs I've ever turned. Then we moved.

I now approach small projects with a bit more caution, because they always tend to snowball out of all proportion to their overall importance to the house. After all, I really could have lived with the standard exterior doorknob on that new door, especially looking at it with 20/20 hindsight from the vantage point of another house.

This was in my mind as I planned what to do about a front door bell. Our house had been through several door bell changes. There was a hole through the door casing from exterior to interior that lined up with a brass bellcrank (a device for linking an input pushrod with and output pushrod ninety degrees apart) mortised into the interior door casing. This mechanism was left over from the original door bell, which would have been some type of mechanically actuated bell with a pull-lever from the outside connecting through the bellcrank to the inside bell.

Later, someone put in a twist-type bell mounted on the door itself. That was later removed, and an electrical bell put in over the hole where the pull-lever came through of the original bell pull. Finally, someone took out the electrical bell and mounted a cheap door knocker onto the screen door.

Once I figured out what the bellcrank was for, I wanted to put in a mechanical bell system similar to the original. I planned just how it would work. Before proceeding, I gave it a bit of thought, though. Would I again be using too much of my limited house-project time on something which wasn't critical to the house?

Plunging ahead, I bought a commercially available bell kit from a reputable restoration hardware supplier. The kit consisted of a bell on a coiled spring mounted to an axle, with a pull-arm to ring the bell and a second smaller coil spring to oppose the pulling action and return the bell to its center position. The kit included a length of braided cord to connect the actuator arm on the bell to an exterior bell knob. There were three pulleys for routing the cord and various small hardware items for mounting. A second kit included the exterior bell knob, rod, and decorative mounting plate. All items except the springs were made from solid brass, heavily cast.

The first thing I did with the bell kit was to slightly rebend both coil springs. The main coil was slightly out of round and visually unattractive, which was easily fixed. The smaller opposing coil wasn't exerting enough force, which also was no trouble to change. I also needed to reverse the smaller coil to work correctly for the direction of operation that I'd be using. By unscrewing the decorative axle end, the coils could be removed and reversed. I then mounted the bell over the center of the door casing. The supplied screws were long enough to extend through the plaster and into the lath, giving a secure mounting.

Somewhat following the instructions with the bell, I next installed the pulley. The mounting bracket for the pulley was a simple piece of sheet brass bent to a right angle, with squared corners. The sharp corners looked a little too plain to me, so I used a bench grinder to round them, followed by fine sandpaper and steel wool. I attached a temporary piece of string to the bell's arm, ran it through the pulley and attached a small weight to its end. I located the pulley on the wall so that the horizontal run of string from the bell-arm to the pulley was level, and so that the vertical run of string from the pulley down to the bellcrank was plumb. Again the mounting screws penetrated to the lath.

Next I had to mount the push-button plate to the outside door casing. This required lots of time spent in preparation. The original hole through the door casing leading to the bellcrank was less than two inches from the edge of the flat part of the door casing. The push-button plate, however, was about five inches in diameter. If I mounted it as it was, the plate would have hang over the edge of the casing by about an inch, so I cut down the diameter of the plate. I used a scrollsaw to make the cut, which took about a half hour, since the plate was made out of cast brass an eighth of an inch thick. I then smoothed and rounded the new edge on a bench grinder, sanded it with increasingly finer grits of wet-dry sandpaper, and finished it with my favorite abrasive, 0000 steel wool. When I was done, the new edge looked like it was made at the factory, if I do say so myself.

My next step was to mount the push-button plate to the outside casing, and the bellcrank to the inside casing. The wood around the screw holes for the bellcrank was very chewed up, and so was the opposite wood on the exterior casing. In both places, the screws wouldn't hold very well, so I used wood restoration epoxies to provide a better grip. First I mixed and applied a thin, penetrating epoxy that soaked into the wood and strengthened it. Then I filled the holes with a wood putty epoxy similar to a wood filler but much stronger. I used the wood putty epoxy to build up the areas where the wood had splintered away and to fill the existing screw holes.

After the epoxy cured, I drilled new screw holes and mounted the bellcrank and push-button plate. I was then ready for a difficult step: connecting the push-button rod to the bellcrank. Most people would be using the kit with one of the supplied pulleys in the place of the bellcrank I had, which would make it easy to route the cord around the pulley, through the wall, and tie the cord to the end of the bell knob rod. But with the bellcrank I was using, when mounted, the end of the bell knob rod would be about six inches from the hole in the bellcrank it needed to meet. In addition, this was completely hidden in the space between the outside and inside door casings. How was I to connect these two ends when there was no access to them?

Suppliers list: Epoxies: Abatron Inc. (800) 445-1754 Door bell kit: Crown City Hardware (800) 950-1047

I eventually thought of using two pieces of small brass tubing, sized so that one fit snugly over the other. One would be connected to the bellcrank and the other to the push-button rod. They could be pushed together inside the wall, with epoxy holding them together. I put this together and slid it into place. The tubes sliding into each other allowed the length of the rod to be adjusted while I put it into place. After the epoxy cured, I attached the knob to the outside end of the rod, and attached the supplied braided cord to the bellcrank and bell.

After an hour making adjustments to spring tensions and the cord length, the system worked perfectly. When the knob is pulled, the bell rings fairly loudly, but with a nice tone. The coil-shaped spring that the bell is mounted on causes the bell to continue ringing for perhaps five seconds. It's a very pleasant way to announce visitors.

To me, it's very satisfying to have been able to incorporate the one remaining element from the original bell system into a doorbell replacement that approximates the original system. And as a bonus, the doorbell is disaster-proof, since it operates without electricity. But after spending many hours on another small project, now I have to make sure we don't move again.

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