Nells Handmade Wind Chimes
“Most chimes you buy in a store don’t sing — they jingle.” Why a 67-year-old former turtle patrol officer in Buxton, NC is selling her last hand-tuned bronze animal-form chimes at cost, before arthritis closes her workshop.
Eleanor “Nell” Pearce at her bench in Buxton — finished chimes on the wall behind her, the one in her hands waiting for its final tuning check.
Two blocks from the dune line in Buxton, North Carolina, there is a single-car garage behind a small wood-frame cottage. Eleanor “Nell” Pearce is 67. She was the Sea Turtle Patrol Coordinator at Cape Hatteras National Seashore from 1987 to 2021 — Loggerhead nests counted before sunrise, hatchlings flagged, every beach between Buxton and Ocracoke. For the last six years, only bronze wind chimes. The first one was a sea turtle. The workshop has grown since.
She does not play them. She tunes them, hangs them on the porch beam, and waits for the wind to come off the dune.
There is a final batch left in the workshop. After that, she stops.
The Sound She Couldn’t Find in a Store
In June 2021, four weeks after she retired, Nell bought three wind chimes at a Cape Hatteras gift shop. Different sizes, different brands, all of them advertised as “coastal.” She hung them on the porch beam and sat in her chair after dinner for two weeks. None of them sounded like the Cape. They sounded like keys on a kitchen counter.
At the end of the second week, she took all three down. At the corner of the porch, next to the screen door, there was a small bronze ship’s bell the previous owner of the cottage had left behind in 1991. Nell tapped it with her fingernail. The bell rang for almost a full minute. The sound moved down the porch and out over the dune.
The 1940s bronze ship’s bell on the porch beam at the Buxton cottage — the sound Nell couldn’t find in a store.
“If a bronze bell from the nineteen-forties sounded more like the surf than three new chimes from a souvenir shop, somebody was getting bronze wrong.”
She drove to the Ace Hardware in Avon the next morning and bought a torch and a pound of bronze stock. “I burned through forty dollars of bronze before the first tube held a note,” she says. “And another forty before I learned to stop holding the torch like a flashlight.” By the end of 2021 the garage had a workbench, a vise, and a wire rack of bronze tubes.
The first finished chime came out in March 2022. Four hand-cut tubes. One mother turtle on top. Five hatchlings below. “I hung it next to the ship’s bell on the porch beam,” she says. “The bell was still louder. But the chime had something the bell didn’t — four tubes talking to each other.” By 2023, the workshop made nothing else.
How One Chime Became Many
The second form came in the summer of 2023. A neighbor’s son drove down from Manteo and asked Nell whether she could put a different animal on top of the chime — his late grandmother had kept a feeder by a window for sixty years, and the songbirds in the live oaks behind her house had been the soundtrack of every summer he remembered. Nell stayed up that night with a recording from the Cape Hatteras visitor center and worked out by morning what longer, thicker tubes would do to the chord.
The chime shipped to Manteo two weeks later. It came back as a photograph three months after that — not as a return, but as a picture of the chime hanging on the late grandmother’s porch in the rain. The note on the back: “She would have asked you to make a hundred of them.”
After that, one request at a time, the wire rack above the bench filled out. A different animal for a kitchen-window feeder in Greenville. Another for a retired ferry captain in Hatteras Village. A third for a snowbird family that summered in Buxton. Over four years, more than a dozen animal forms found their way onto the bench — each one started with a customer who wanted a specific sound for a specific porch. Each one is tuned the same way Nell tunes the sea turtle. Each one gets the bronze fragment check.
The wire rack above the bench — sea turtle, barred owl, hummingbird, and dolphin tops, all built on the same four-tube architecture, all tuned against the same fragment.
What It Sounds Like When the Wind Comes Off the Dune
On the cedar porch at dawn — tap to hear the wind play it.
On the beach-house deck in the morning breeze — tap to listen.
A bronze chime sounds nothing like the painted-aluminum tube chimes most porches end up with. Bronze sustains. Each strike rings — and keeps ringing — for close to a full minute. The four tubes overlap and bleed into one another. The animal pendants underneath rattle softly. The dome above the tubes catches the sound and pushes it down into the porch instead of letting it scatter.
Different animal forms put different voices on the porch. Larger forms get longer, thicker tubes that sit low in the chord. Smaller, quicker forms get shorter narrower tubes that run brighter and faster — closer to a trill at a feeder in July. Same bronze on every chime. Same fragment check. Different voice for every form.
In a light afternoon breeze, three or four overlapping notes a minute, with the sustain holding on between strikes. In a steady evening wind off the dune, the tubes start trading the lead and the pendants come in underneath like a slow rattle. In a coastal storm, the chime moves into full chord and stays there until the wind drops.
“I spent thirty-four summers listening to the Atlantic teach me what surf sounds like. The chime is what I learned, set in bronze.”
Nell’s own chime — the sea-turtle one she finished in March 2022 — has hung on the same porch beam for four years. It has not come inside once. When the wind comes off the dune at dusk, she sits at the kitchen window with a cup of tea and listens.
“When the wind comes off the dune at dusk, she sits at the kitchen window with a cup of tea and listens.”
The Drawer of Cards in the Workbench
Nell keeps the cards in the top drawer of the workbench, directly above the bench vise. Postcards, folded notes, the occasional photograph. She pulled the drawer open when I asked to see them.
“I don’t open the drawer often,” she said. “Every now and then, when a tube isn’t coming to gauge, I do.”
She set three on the workbench.
The top drawer of the workbench above the vise.
The first was from a woman named Anne in Camden, Maine, who had hung her barred-owl chime on the porch beam of her summer cottage in late September. The first proper Atlantic storm came through in October, late at night. She had opened the screen door and stood barefoot in the doorway for the full twenty minutes the chime was in chord, and then mailed Nell a folded card the next week. The card said: “I have lived on this coast for forty-one years and I have never been still for twenty minutes in the rain.”
“That one I keep on top of the stack,” Nell said.
The second was from a man named Daniel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. No coast, no dune line, no Atlantic. He had hung his hummingbird chime on a hook on the back-garden trellis, next to the feeder. The first warm April breeze caught it on a Saturday morning while he was making coffee in the kitchen with the back door open. He wrote that he had stopped what he was doing and stood at the back door for the rest of the morning.
“He wrote me that the chime gave a Saturday morning in his back garden a sound he hadn’t known he was missing. I had never been to Pittsburgh. I picture his back garden every time the wind comes up here.”
The third was a folded card from a woman named Patricia in Topsail Beach, North Carolina. Patricia had hung her sea-turtle chime above her front-porch rocking chair and had never moved it. The card had one sentence on it, in blue ballpoint pen:
“I sit on the porch every night now. I never used to.”
Nell slid the three cards back into the drawer and pushed it closed.
“That last one I think about when I’m filing a tube,” she said. “You spend thirty-four years walking the beach before dawn, and somebody on a porch in Topsail Beach reminds you why.”
An owl chime on a weathered porch at sunset — one of the chimes that left the workshop, on a porch somewhere along the coast.
What’s Inside Each One
A single bronze tube, clamped and tuned by hand. Files, tuning fork, tuning hammer — every chime that leaves the bench has been through this exact step.
Four hand-cut bronze tubes. The animal pendants below. The dome above. The same five details on every form.
Five details set Nell’s chimes apart from the painted-aluminum tube chimes on Amazon. Every form on the rack has the same five.
Four hand-cut bronze tubes with the long, warm sustain Nell spent six years getting right. Each strike rings — and keeps ringing — for almost a full minute. Aluminum jingles and dies. Bronze carries the surf.
The ornamental bronze cap at the top isn’t decoration — it’s an acoustic reflector. It funnels the sound from the four tubes downward and outward instead of letting it scatter into the air. Without the dome, a chime drifts. With this one, it projects.
Bronze with an antique patina is naturally salt-air resistant. Six years on the Outer Banks have proven it. No rust, no corrosion. Built for porches that see weather, not cabinets that see dust.
Every chime gets a final tuning check against a single fragment of bronze Nell keeps in the front pocket of her work apron. She picked it up off the workbench one August morning in 2019. It rings between E and F — the frequency of the surf at Cape Point at dawn. Every form she makes leaves the workshop in tune with the same fragment.
One animal on top, smaller pendants below. Each form started with somebody who wanted a specific sound for a specific porch — an owl for a grandmother, a hummingbird for a kitchen window, a dolphin for a ferry captain. The form is the tribute. The sound is the chime.
Why This Is the Last Batch
By spring 2025, Nell’s hands had started to tell her things she had been ignoring. Arthritis in both, worse on the right — the side that holds the tuning hammer. By February she could file a tube to gauge in the morning. By April she couldn’t file a tube to gauge after lunch. By May the right thumb wouldn’t grip the hammer for more than twenty minutes at a stretch.
“You can teach a hand to walk a beach for thirty-four summers. You can’t teach a hand to tune bronze when it stops working. Mine has stopped.”
The last touch before the chime leaves the workshop.
She has hand-tuned this last batch herself — every chime in the final run, by her own hand, across every animal form on the rack. After these, she puts the tuning hammer down.
A hand-tuned bronze chime from a coastal-gallery maker runs eighty to a hundred dollars. Nell is selling the last batch at cost. She has refused two consignment offers from coastal galleries and a Wilmington wholesaler who wanted to put them in boutique shops up and down the Carolina coast.
“I don’t need the money. I need them to sing. A chime that sits on a collector’s shelf is just bronze.”
While the last batch remains:
Check AvailabilityThe last hand-tuned bronze chimes from Nell’s workshop — while they remain
What They Wrote Nell After the First Wind
★★★★★
“We bought the barred-owl chime for the screened-in porch. A storm front came through two days after it arrived. My husband and I sat on the porch and didn’t say a word for the whole forty minutes the chime was in chord. I have never owned a thing that made us stop talking before.”
★★★★★
“Bought my wife the hummingbird chime for our fortieth anniversary. It hangs from the trellis hook at the corner of the back deck. We get prairie wind here, not coastal wind, but the chime takes it just the same. It is the first thing she comments on when she comes home from work.”
★★★★★
“I have lived in Florida for thirty years and never owned a chime I didn’t take down within a year. The cheap ones get loud, the expensive ones get loud the same way. This one — we picked the sea turtle — stays. The sound is steady and slow.”
Three Honest Questions Before You Order
Which animal form should I pick — do they sound very different?
Every form shares the same bronze, the same dome, the same hand-tuning against the Cape Point fragment — the family sound is the same. The differences come from tube length: smaller animals with shorter tubes run brighter and quicker, larger animals with longer tubes sit lower. Pick the one that means something to you on the porch you’ll hang it on. Customers tend to pick the animal tied to a memory, a feeder, a window, a person.
Where am I supposed to hang it — and won’t the bronze rust on a coast?
Outside, anywhere the wind can reach — porch beam, deck railing, garden trellis, balcony hook, lanai. The bronze carries an antique patina that is naturally salt-air resistant. Nell’s own has hung on the same porch beam in Buxton for four years through Outer Banks storms. Most customers never bring it inside.
What if I don’t love it when it arrives?
30 days to return for a full refund, no questions asked. A quick email to the support team gets it sorted.
The final run is on her workbench right now.
Check AvailabilityHand-tuned by Nell in Buxton — sealed with her handwritten note