Officials from the Raleigh Fire Department removed the bell that was situated on top of Withers Hall, Sunday morning, and had it delivered to a facility downtown where it will be restored. Officials will then place it in a location that is in a public place.Several historians are working on the bell’s restoration.Matthew Robbins, a graduate teaching assistant in architecture, who had been working on having the bell be relocated from Withers Hall into the Bell Tower, was present at the ceremony.”It was a wonderful morning for something like this to happen,” Robbins said. “It took about five hours, but it was amazing. They had to get a seven story crane to reach up there and cut the bell out. A lot of important people in the University came out,  but I didn’t see a whole lot of students there.”After Robbins gathered support from student organizations for his initial idea of relocating the bell, acoustical tests were done on the Bell Tower to see how the bell would sound. The tests revealed the bell was cast in bronze alloy and could not be used in conjunction with anything else.”It was never designed to sound pretty,” Robbins said. “It’s not tuned and wouldn’t work for a Bell Tower.”The bell was originally placed on top of Raleigh City Hall in the 1800s and the fire department used it to warn citizens of fires. Once the bell was no longer needed, it was given to Colonel J. W. Harrelson, chancellor of N.C. State from 1945 to 1953.”[Harrelson’s] goal was to finish the Tower,” Robbins said. “He wanted to top the Bell Tower off with something amazing, but because of money, it never made it there and it stayed on Withers.”Robbins is now trying to gather support to place a real set of bells in the Bell Tower.But he said the administration must first approve the proposal.”Once the administration approves it, it becomes a money issue,” Robbins said. “All of the money will have to come from donations.”Katerina Fantini, a freshman in first year college, said she doesn’t believe that the Bell Tower needs a bell to be significant to NCSU.”It would be cool to have an actual bell, but the Bell Tower is significant itself,” Fantini said. “I don’t think a bell needs to signify the Bell Tower nowadays with technology and everything.”Though the Bell Tower employs an electronic set of bells, Cress Clippard, a sophomore in engineering, said he feels the Bell Tower is incomplete without an actual set of bells.”We might as well start calling it the clock tower or the N.C. State Tower,” Clippard said. “An electronic speaker isn’t going to appreciate with age, but a real bell will. It will be historic and people can always remember it.”