Bell Chimes

I made a pretty accurate model of a real church bell, and turned it into wind chimes.

Plastic bells don’t make a ringing sound but they do make a rich clinking sound (more pleasant than other shapes I think). They sound a bit like a bamboo wind chime but with a deeper tone. I put some 1 inch jinglebells inside them as clappers, and these add higher pitched sounds for a very pleasant overall soft windchime sound. If you want a more quiet sound, I made the first version with 0.4mm printer nozzles as clappers and that sounded great. You could also use 6mm nuts or similar things for clappers.

I made the bell model twice as large as shown in the pictures in case other makers want bigger bells. To make it like the pictures, the bell should be printed at 50% size and the other two parts at 100% size. The bells should be printed upside down with a small ring of support just on the top. I used the paint-on support feature in Prusaslicer. That top curve needs just a little support, but the body of the bell prints fine without support. The other parts don’t need support.

The hanger is two pieces that glue together. There is a little hole where you can insert a very short piece of filament to help align the pieces when glueing.

You will also need: small washers or nuts (I used M3 washers), jingle bells, fishing line, cyanoacrylate glue, and a 0.4mm nozzle or nut. You can buy a bag of jingle bells for a few dollars at a craft store or on Amazon. 

I used 8 lb. test fishing line to hang everything. For the five bells in a circle: Tie a piece of fishing line onto a jingle bell, tie a washer 25mm above that (I just used an overhand knot so I could adjust it up and down later) and fish it through the hole in the top of the bell. Tie the other end of the fishing line to a hole in the hanger ring and repeat for the other 5 bells.

For the middle two bells, use a longer piece of fishing line and do the same thing with the bottom bell, but then tie a figure 8 knot and thread on a nozzle about 110mm above that, then tie a washer on 25mm above that and put the top bell on. Tie the double bell fishing line to the top of the hanger. You want the middle bell on the bottom to tap the surrounding bells when the wind blows.

One important point! print the bells with 100% infill. They sound a lot better that way.

Also, the holder looks much better if you use concentric top and bottom fill patterns. In Prusaslicer, go to 'print settings’, then ‘Infill', and set the 'Top fill pattern:' and 'Bottom fill pattern:' to Concentric. This is most important if you are using multicolored filament.

I used translucent PLA for the solid color bells and two-color PLA for the other two bells and the hanger. The wind chime is really pretty when the light is shining through the bells. I am very happy with how it turned out.

I included the Fusion360 file for anyone who wants to remix this. Enjoy!