Vintage Corner: George Way’s “Henry Adler Tone Control” practice pad, 1950s

Readers will remember that last year, I acquired an early generation Henry Adler adjustable practice pad and was over the moon.

Well, I now have what is really the mate to that pad, existing at the other end of the historical arc. 

George Way’s version of this pad was licensed from Henry Adler and made by George Way Drums in the mid to late 1950s. This version of the design was manufactured for less than a decade, and when George Way was forced out of his own company by Camco Drums the pad was discontinued. It’s a rare pad and hard to find in any condition. A few years ago, one of Way’s pads was sold on eBay in poor condition, without the internal mechanism or the moving side doors; bidding was fierce and it sold for over $200 — too rich for my blood at the time.

But this was the version of the pad I’d been looking for all along. And I had an opportunity to buy one last month. It arrived this week.

 It works, though the slider tends to move when open and struck on top. The internal arms that hold the side doors are attached by means of a small leather piece that seems to provide for greater ease of motion; however, one of the leather pieces is gone, replaced by a small piece of steel band attached with a large thumbtack. The leather piece on the other side is intact, and got hit with some paint. I may look for a way to stabilize it further and keep it from rotting. The result of this mismatched repair is that one of the doors opens farther than the other, and doesn’t close fully with the lever is moved to the closed position.

The other issue is that Way chose to redesign the pad — he was always tinkering with designs — so that the door hinges are at the top, rather than the bottom as on Adler’s original design. He also replaced the simpler wood knob with a metal assembly that uses a sliding lever to open and close the doors. I actually think Adler had the better idea, as the weight of the open door would help to keep it in place to wherever it was adjusted; and the wood knob means fewer parts inside to potentially fail. Having the doors swing out from the bottom means that weight could cause the doors to fall slightly closed again, and that’s the case with this Way pad.

A previous owner applied white paint (Killz? Flat base? No idea) on the top panel of the pad. 

I was able to remove a lot of the white paint from the sides of ths panel by gently scrubbing it with a sponge and some warm water. The white paint on the top appears to have been applied directly onto bare wood where the yellow paint had completely worn away. I'm going to take it to my local paint supply and see if they can help me match the color, and if they can I’ll sand the to lightly and cover the white with a new coating of yellow.

I doubt I plan to do much more than that. The original red rubber on top still has rebound — though the rubber used on George Way pads always tended to be firmer than gum rubber anyway — and I won’t bother trying to remove the circles that someone drew on, probably with a ballpoint pen. The pad works, and I very happy to have these two historic “bookends” in my collection.