As you can see in this "Before" photo if you would just take the time to click on it and look, not only was the hardware old, rusty and pitted, but quite a few items were missing: floor tom legs, bass drum spurs, a wooden hoop and all the "T's and claws."
These were problems that I thought I would remedy by simply replacing the existing hardware. But, darn those Japanese, they just had to be different when it came to lug sizes, tension rod threads and stuff like that. After many, many hours of searching I just could not find any new hardware to match the existing. So I decided I would just replace the hardware with new hardware that looked relatively similar but, darn those Japanese, I found it impossible to find any hardware that would fit the existing holes.
After long hours of deep contemplation and a few sleepless nights mulling over my options I came to the conclusion that I would just have to clean up this kit as best I could and go with it. I could have gone to all the trouble of drilling new holes in the shells to make new hardware fit but I kept remembering my advice to others: NEVER drill new holes!!! I decided the decrepit state of the chrome on this set would be far less devaluing than the presence of a hundred new holes. The existing hardware would have to remain. It wouldn't look any worse than the splotchy, discolored wrap anyway.
Here is where I am now. The two toms and the snare have been cleaned, re-headed and reassembled. I found some floor tom legs, but then ran into problems with the leg mounts which are again, Japanese! The wing nuts are missing and are unfortunately some strange size and threading that I was unable to match. Therefore I am replacing the eye-bolts with ones with threads I can deal with.
The bass drum is still under construction due to more hardware problems. The tension rods required to make this drum function have to be an extra-long seven inches to reach the single row of double-headed lugs mounted around the perimeter of the shell. They also have to be an odd Japanese thread in order to fit the existing swivel nuts in the lugs. Finding tension rods with these specifications would prove to be a hopeless search, and finding any tension rods of the proper length was difficult enough. I did manage to find some, but only if I bought twice as many as I needed and paid four times what I wanted to pay. Such is life as it plays out on Ebay sometimes, so I am now waiting for these rods to arrive, along with new swivel nuts to replace the Japanese ones so the rods will fit. Hopefully this will all work out in the end.
The bass drum spurs I had to fashion myself, as ONCE AGAIN the dad-ratted Japanese thought it would be friggin' hilarious to make their spur mounts with slightly smaller 5/16" holes instead of 3/8" like everyone else in America. Therefore no spurs I could find would fit unless I made them myself (or replaced the mounts altogether which I didn't want to do). So now I am also waiting on some special 5/16" rubber tips to put on the ends of my homemade spurs.
Finally, I have a lot of work to do on the bass drum hoops. Since the unique color of the inlay strip would again be IMPOSSIBLE TO MATCH, I had to just find any 20" wooden hoop I could find to go with the other. Now they both need to be sanded and painted before they go back on.
Maybe I should go work on that now.
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