Call the Kids to Dinner!

Sleepless night and needed something quiet to do. How about a Gothic-Revival dinner gong from England c.1880 modeled in SketchUp? Those crazy Victorians knew how to get a party started.

One of my Sketchy styles and some Fotosketcher action.

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OMG! My grandparents had one just like that in the hall in their house in Kent, UK. And it was used for its purpose!

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:smiley:

Did it work?

Oh yes. It had a kind of reverberating sound that hung in the air. 'Course, as kids, we all wanted to be allowed to bang it. I remember that the head was a globular ball of filled leather but was a bit loose on the end of its stick, so there was always the peril that it might come off.

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If you have another sleepless night and want to add detail, the wood was a dark oak and the gong itslelf was bronze with a slightly dimpled finish.

I wish we’d had a gong. My dad tried a small bell he put on a post by the back door but we usually couldn’t hear it. He could whistle louder and would call us with three short blasts. A friend’s father put a whistle from a steam locomotive on the roof of his garage and connected it to an air compressor. The kids could hear that but so could the engineer on the 5:15. He made several emergency stops because of it. :smiley:

The one I modeled this from has a dark, fumed oak frame and the gong appears to be hammered bronze. The striker has white or light tan leather on the head.

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