By Jody Record, Media Relations

For the first time since construction started in March, the bell in the clock tower at T-Hall tolled last week, rung by a UNH student whose father had painstakingly restored the building’s historic clock and weathervane.

Shortly before noon on Friday, Phil D’Avanza and his daughter, Andrea, climbed the steep run of steps leading up to the tower. There, a thick rope dangled from the bronze bell, which remained hidden by the worn floorboards above.

The small room was dominated by the large green and gold mechanism housed in a windowed enclosure made of old wooden planks. The wood walls bore the scrawls of former students and visitors, with some signatures dating back to the 1800s.

Sophomore Andrea D’Avanza, 19, rang the bell 20 times, signifying the completion of the $5 million restoration project that has returned the 114-year old building to its original splendor.

Her sister, Jessica, also a UNH student, missed the occasion because she is spending the first semester of her senior year at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California.

A Goffstown resident, Phil D'Avanza is a clockmaker and tower clock restoration specialist. To bring T-Hall’s three-faced E. Howard clock back to its natural grace, he restored the iron frames of the 60-inch face—12 pieces in all—and installed new glass.

“You would expect a certain amount of corrosion,” D’Avanza said of the clock’s condition before he began his work. “There was orange rust coming out.”

D’Avanza also took the clock’s mechanism apart and built a custom designed automatic rewind system to replace the old crank. For the bell, cast in Troy, New York, around 1893, he made new cribbing out of white oak.

His previous work includes the tower clocks at the Pembroke Town Hall, the Ash Street School in Manchester and at Phillips Exeter Academy.