Be Swiss Swatch The Club Event, Spiez / Gstaad, Switzerland, 27 to 29-JUL-2007

Mission "Cow Bell"

On saturday morning, it was time for a visit to Gstaad and the Swatch FIVB 2007 World Championships. But the first topic on the agenda was a mysterious mission: Mission "Cow Bell". Nobody knew exactly what this was about....

After one hour bus ride, we arrived in Gstaad and immediately walked over to the Swatch Tent Village which was built up on a meadow right next to the village. All items on the campground were "Swatch"-branded:

the swimming pool was "Swatch" branded

the grill was "Swatch" branded

the wooden blocks (to sit on) were "Swatch" branded

We gathered at an edge of the meadow and we were introduced to René Kern-Berger: The SwissBell Foundry hand crafts the worlds finest cow bells.

So we learned how a real cow bell is produced by hand using nothing but sand, metal, and lots of heat. First of all, a negative imprint of a metal form is made using some special sand and lots of pressure:

The hanger of the bell is moulded in the form

now we have a negative imprint, so the decoration of the imprint can start

the bell can be decorated with little symbols, animals, ...

...letters...

...and Swatch watches :-)

we all know this shape very well...

and now, the negative form is ready

put the two negative forms (upper and lower part) together again

more than 1000 deg. Celsius!

now the moulding of the bell begins

the metal (bronze) is still liquid

After about 15 minutes, the metal has frozen and the form can be removed. Usually, it takes at least one hour until the metal has cooled down enough but in our case, 15 minutes had to be enough. So let's see how our own two cow bells have turned out:

upper part has been removed, the black color is sand which will be brushed off in a few minutes

removing the inner part of the form, you can see that each form can only be used once
because it will be destroyed when opening up again. So each bell is unique!