Vintage Corner: Slingerland drum UPDATE 3

Yesterday and today, I hurled some love at the rims and the shell.

The drum came to me last summer in pretty bad shape. After careful cleaning, the rims shows fatigue in several spots and the shell had been gouged pretty badly in a couple of spots. I had to decide how much time and effort I wanted to invest, and wheter of not it was worth it.

In the end, I chose a compromise.

Since the shell and rims were still pretty nicely round, I decided to honor the "beausage" (literally, "beauty through usage") the drum had acquired over the decades. After repairing the worst of the cracks (which I did with R's help), I decided I would lightly sand some of the roughest spots, leave the old varnish on everything else, and cover the sanded spots with some clear nail polish. It's not what a real woddworker would do, but I'm not a woodworker and decided that the drum looked more beautiful with its war wounds. (I certainly didn't want to cover the beautiful wood with colored paint! And I couldn't justify the cost of NOS wood hoops for a drum so beat up.)

The rim repair that Ron had helped me with has held nicely, supported by the pieces of bicycle spoke I inserted. All that remained was selective sanding and varnishing with clear nail polish.

The batter rim was marked with spots where the hooks had gathered rust underneath, which had soaked into the wood. Sanding would remove more wood before it removed the rust stains, so I sanded lightly and then varnished with nail polish.

 

The shell posed another aesthetic challenge because a previous owner had gouged it, maybe with a belt buckle while marching.
The gouging had worn through multiple layers of the ply, and while there's still plenty of wood there, filling the depression with wood putty would have been more of a headache than I was prepared for. (I just have a little Tuff-Shed where I fix bikes. Not roomy or fancy.) So I sanded the area lightly to smooth it out a little, cleaned it, and then applied more nail polish.

The nice thing about nail polish is that it fills the grain nicely, and dries quickly between coats

The other thing about mahogany is how it shines when the light catches the grain, even when it's been banged up.

The shell just glows, in a way it didn't when I first got this drum.

That's why I chose to let the drum keep its patina, earned through a hundred performances and a thousand rehearsals, played by any number of hands.

This one's a keeper, and I can't wait until tomorrow to sling it up and try it out.

Video coming soon.
Below: Before, and after.