Lets see them kits of yours!

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Roman
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Roman »

Hey! At least we're back to kits instead of fucking cats.
Rest assured, any thread that goes long enough, Cats, Hitler,and Nazis will come up.

hmmmm, maybe they're interconnected?
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Greg_L
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Greg_L »

Roman wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:30 pm Hey! At least we're back to kits instead of fucking cats.
Hmmm, well, I'm glad I missed the part about fucking cats. :cuckoo:
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rammer24
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by rammer24 »

You didn't. You were a huge part of it..... :D
Greg_L wrote: Fri Jan 27, 2017 10:34 am I fucking hate cats.

Well, I don't hate them, I wouldn't purposefully hit one with my car, but I hate them as pets. They're fucking useless. Everyone says their cat is different and they're fun and all that, but it's lies. A cat doesn't give one single fucking fuck about it's owner, yet that owner will bend over backwards to care for that cat. It's a backwards relationship and cat people are the suckers. :stirthepot: :biggrin:
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liv_rong
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by liv_rong »

SweetDan wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2017 2:29 am So I've added another piece - bass drum. I bought another cheapo kit a month and a half ago that had an 18" bass drum. It needed some/lots of work.

BEFORE (not mine, but mine looked exactly like this when purchased)
Screen Shot 2017-04-19 at 10.37.14 PM.png
(Love that wrap? How 'bout them lugs? :frown: There were only 6; there are 8 on a side now)

I took off that horrible iridescent blue wrap (heated/softened with a hair dryer) and scrubbed for hours with an acetone-soaked rag to strip off all the adhesive. The shell was basswood or maybe poplar ply; really light colored and pretty soft. I cut the shell down from 16" to about 13" deep, cut a bearing edge on the now-flat side, attached mahogany veneer, then stained and covered the veneer with polyurethane. Bought some hardware and a new head (re-used one of the existing heads for the resonant side), measured and drilled new holes, and put it all back together. (Not necessarily in that order)

AFTER (Please excuse the horrible photo quality; quick snap w/my ancient cell phone)
Screen Shot 2017-04-19 at 10.50.51 PM.png
Awesome! Looks good! How much time did that take you? How does it sound? How did you cut the bearing edge? Router? Did you make some kind of jig to keep it all square? Details please!
Roman
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Roman »

rammer24 wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2017 4:22 pm You didn't. You were a huge part of it..... :D
Greg_L wrote: Fri Jan 27, 2017 10:34 am I fucking hate cats.

Well, I don't hate them, I wouldn't purposefully hit one with my car, but I hate them as pets. They're fucking useless. Everyone says their cat is different and they're fun and all that, but it's lies. A cat doesn't give one single fucking fuck about it's owner, yet that owner will bend over backwards to care for that cat. It's a backwards relationship and cat people are the suckers. :stirthepot: :biggrin:
:lollers: :lollers2: :lollers: :lollers2:
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Greg_L
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Greg_L »

rammer24 wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2017 4:22 pm You didn't. You were a huge part of it..... :D

I had nothing to do with fucking cats.
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rammer24
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by rammer24 »

Oh, you're talking verbs. "Fucking cats". Right. :D
Roman
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Roman »

Same response as my last post. :D
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by zed32 »

After looking around on my computer, I came to realize that I don't have many pictures of my latest drum setup. This was the best I could find, from when I was in a band years and years ago. My kit in its simplest form, 12" up and 16" down.

Image
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SweetDan
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by SweetDan »

liv_rong wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2017 7:01 pm Awesome! Looks good! How much time did that take you? How does it sound? How did you cut the bearing edge? Router? Did you make some kind of jig to keep it all square? Details please!
Thanks, man!

Hours and hours. 20-30 actual working time. I made all the cuts and did all the shaping with hand tools; it could be done with a table saw and a router/routing table, but I have neither. I snapped a few photos during the build process, thinking I'd eventually write it down and post something online, but I haven't yet dumped all the photos off my phone. Here are a few tricks I learned to pull it all together, though:

- removing the old wrap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgD2ZlVPjys ; the dude in the video uses a heat gun, I used a hair dryer to heat things up; I was pretty unlucky in that there was tons of adhesive that didn't come off cleanly with the heat, but by using rags, lots of acetone, and elbow grease, I cleaned that all up (the acetone will dry clean and not stain the wood)

- cutting the shell down, using a handsaw clamped to a block on the workbench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy1Auj_X53A ; I cut off two 1.5" rings from one end of the shell, partly to make the thing smaller (18"x13" instead of it's original 18x16), and partly to re-use those rings as supports inside the edges (I trimmed a little segment out of each ring, then glued the rings inside the shell right at the rims)

- cut a new bearing edge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMPs_3q60F8 ; I used a half-round wood rasp to cut an angle on the the bearing edge, then smoothed it up with a half-round file and sandpaper; to keep it as flat as possible, I'd periodically rotate the shell on pieces of sandpaper stuck on top of the workbench with double-sided tape - that was to eliminate dips and peaks in the edge if I gouged too deeply with the rasp; I didn't end up with a "perfect" edge, but it's not bad either

- I filled in the old lug, spur, and tom-mount holes using dowels or scraps from cutting the rings; you may note the absence of a tom mount - I didn't want it on this drum, and if I ever add a hi-tom to the set, I'm tempted to try one of those combination cymbal+tom-arm stands

- laying out the positions of the new lug holes wasn't bad (with 8 lugs, you're just dealing with 45- and 90-degree angles; 10 lugs would be more difficult); I basically found the 8 points along one rim at 0/45/90/135/180/etc. degrees with some guesswork, 2 straight-edges, and a speed square, then using the square and straight-edge marked lines down the outside of the shell; after that, I used a marking gauge set at the correct depths for each of the lug mounting holes to mark where to drill

- drilling the lug and spur holes (using a powered hand drill; I don't have a drill press either) was a bit trickier, for two reasons: 1) trying to keep the bit from wandering off the mark, and 2) avoiding splits/tear-outs; to recover from the wandering bit error, I'd try to fit a lug into each pair of holes as I drilled them, and if I was off a little, I'd use a small round file to shape the hole until the lug would fit (i.e., some of the holes ended up oval-ish in shape, but you can't see them anyway)

- I asked the people at my local woodworking store (Woodcraft, in my case) about the best way to attach veneer to the shell. They said contact cement; it would hold the strongest given the somewhat awkward working conditions (difficult to get enough clamps all around the curved surface). I bought the mahogany veneer from them too, of course. I didn't take the veneer all the way to the edge; I left about 1/4" at the top and bottom, so the drum head wouldn't contact the veneer, but close enough the head assembly would cover up the gap.

- staining/finishing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjlIAq17aVc ; in that video, the maker is staining a mandolin with a water-based stain; I used two colors (an "amber" and a deep, reddish "mahogany") of oil-based stain, which didn't blend as well, but it's OK; when the stain was dry, I brushed on a single, thick coat of polyurethane; previous to that, I had experimented with the stain and poly on a scrap piece of veneer, trying 1, 2, and 3 coats of poly, just to see which produced the finish I wanted

Somewhere in between the first and the last steps, I had spent lots of time browsing around http://www.amdrumparts.com/ and http://www.drumfactorydirect.com/ , looking for "just the right" lugs and other miscellaneous hardware and heads I needed to complete the project. I ended up ordering from drumfactorydirect, and probably bought the cheapest parts (because cheap = "just right" in this case). I had to buy 16 lugs and tension rods, but re-using the hooks that were part of the original drum, I only had to buy 4 new of those. They don't look exactly like the original claw hooks, so I put them on the bottom when assembling it so you can't see they're different.

As far as sound quality, I'm not a drummer, so I don't have enough experience/context to know how good it sounds, but it sounds OK to me. From what I've read or watched online, even a cheap kit can sound good if you get new heads and properly tune them. It's perfectly sufficient for bashing out a few things here and there and learning how to play. I anticipate I won't record live drums much, scratch tracks maybe (I have only 2 channels on my interface anyway), but I'll use what I learn in playing to program better drum parts.
awesome youtube comment of the day
Lol it's still less satanic than whatever rituals Katie Perry and Taylor Swift do in their performances. 😂
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SweetDan
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by SweetDan »

...and here are some sounds from my little bass drum, mic'd up with an SM57 inside the bass drum, and a blue spark (LDC) up and over the snare and pointed a bit towards the hats as an "overhead":

raw:
bass drum(2).mp3

with hat/snare, no f/x:
hatSnareBass_raw.mp3

and with a bit of EQ on both the bass and the overhead channels:
hatSnareBass_allEq.mp3
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awesome youtube comment of the day
Lol it's still less satanic than whatever rituals Katie Perry and Taylor Swift do in their performances. 😂
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liv_rong
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by liv_rong »

Sounds pretty good, that's a lot of time invested!
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by einstein magoo »

Late 70s Pearl Wood and Fiberglass kit. 5" x 14" Chrome Slingerland Snare same vintage. Old ass, crappy sounding Zildian 14" Hats, 20" Ride, 14" Crash and Cheap Paste 18" Crash. These are some LOUD drumbs!!

Kinda suck at playing, but can sort of keep a beat. Just loads of fun.


IMG_0689.JPG
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einstein magoo
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by einstein magoo »

IMG_0689.JPG
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rammer24
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by rammer24 »

Nice kit. Even cooler is the acoustic bass.
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einstein magoo
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by einstein magoo »

The acoustic bass is cool. it's a real cheapo bought sperm of the moment cause I had been thinking of trying one, it was new and only like $119 and just appealed to me at the time. Had it for about 15 years or so. Carlo Robelli...real bottom of the pit stuff, but very functional. Recently restrung and tweaked the truss rod a little, and since it's the only one I've ever messed with, it's OK for me.
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liv_rong
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by liv_rong »

Everyone just loves when you bump old ass threads!

I've been playing quite a bit of drums lately, barely any guitar. I moved some cymbals around today, been using some older cracked cymbals the last year or more and really love them for accent cymbals and wanted to better position them. They are the K crashes (actually that K EFX is cracked too and I actually have a cracked 10" K spalsh under it, a stack of cracked cymbals lol). Sorry, no before pictures.
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Greg_L
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by Greg_L »

Cracked Ks huh? That's an expensive crack!
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by WhiskeyJack »

Man i tapped out of thos thread entirely and it looks like i missed a lot. I got alot of reading to do tonight lol
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liv_rong
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Re: Lets see them kits of yours!

Post by liv_rong »

Greg_L wrote: Fri Sep 27, 2019 10:23 pm Cracked Ks huh? That's an expensive crack!
Indeed! I had a thread a while back about them cracking and picking out new ones. I actually prefer the new ones, the HHX's.
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