WHITE PEARL U.S. MERCURY SNARE & TOM

Here is a vintage Japanese snare drum and 12" tom drum that I recently won on Ebay.  Unfortunately I lost the auction for the bass drum.  These drums have a unique White Pearl finish and bear the U.S. Mercury badge, which always cracks me up: Japanese-made "U.S. Mercury" drums.  Were they trying to think of a name that sounded like these cheap drums were built by NASA?  Well, it worked pretty well anyway.  Lots of people don't realize these drums, intentionally fashioned to closely resemble American brands, were all made in Japan.  But they are still cool to collect and restore, even if they are less valuable than Ludwigs and Slingerlands.

Here is how they cleaned up.  First the snare (and please pardon the poor lighting conditions; it was rather overcast this day):

Fairly routine clean-up job.  No major issues.  This drum was in pretty good condition except for something not shown in the "before" photo:

Yes, that is a Ludwig assembly mounted where the original strainer mechanism was, which pretty much ruins the value of this drum to nit-picky collectors.  I, however, do not stress too much over this violation.  What's done is done, and the new strainer functions so that the drum is playable and it looks good as well.

Now for the 12-inch tom, which was missing its bottom rim.  I located a new one and got this drum looking proper once again.

Well, I apologize that the weather was not ideal for photography and I am no professional picture-taker.  These drums really do look very nice in person.  Now if I could only track down that bass drum....