This kit started out with an 8x12" tom. Nobody else wanted it on Ebay so I bought it. Why not? You never know what might happen or what you might learn. I didn't particularly like the appearance of the wrap, and it was an odd pattern I had never seen before. I had no idea what to even call it. Maybe it was a custom wrap, some faux wood wallpaper or adhesive shelf lining somebody stuck on this drum? You never know. But I bought it anyway, cleaned it up and set it aside.
Sometime later I came across a matching snare drum. So this
was a legitimate drum wrap! Wow. People actually
bought kits in this ugly pattern?
Whew! Oh, well. Whatever. I bought the snare drum and cleaned it up. Now I had two drums with the same unusual, unidentified wrap which, now that I looked at the light and dark contrasts more visible on the snare, started to make sense. The pattern resembled a hardwood floor, maybe like a bamboo hardwood floor with "pearly" overtones.
Researching my thoughts on Google, I looked through numerous images of various bamboo flooring patterns and found this example:
Yep. That looked a lot like the wrap on my drums. So I decided to name the pattern "Bamboo Pearl" because it resembled the look of bamboo flooring with a pearl overlay. Plus drum manufacturers of the sixties named everything "(something) Pearl." Black Diamond Pearl. Blue Oyster Pearl. Sparkling Silver Pearl. White Marine Pearl. Miss Minnie Pearl. And so on and so forth.....
A short time thereafter I came across a 20-inch bass drum. So of course I had to have it! As luck would have it, absolutely no one competed with me in the auction for this ugly, neglected old bass drum with the weird wooden wrap and the chipped-up, rusty rims. It pays to collect crap that no one else wants. It makes the acquisition part much easier.
So now on this larger drum I had a much clearer view of the wrap pattern, and the unique look of it was starting to grow on me the more I studied it. Now it didn't seem quite so bad, but it definitely looked like bamboo flooring. Pearl bamboo flooring.
To see if my impression of the pattern was consistent with the view of other people, I posted a photo of the bass drum on Facebook and challenged friends to name the pattern. Besides suggestions such as "Butterscotch Brickle," "Spoiled Celery," and "OrangeYaGlad...it's no longer available..." I got a couple of interesting responses: "Bamboozled!" and "Bamboo Enema Elegante." Well, ignoring the "enema" part, I found it interesting that two other people thought of "bamboo." So I decided the name I had come up with was pretty spot-on.
Here is what my "kit" looks like now that I have cleaned and restored it. It still could use a floor tom to make it complete, but it's pretty cool the way it is. The black metal hoops on the bass drum took quite a while to sand and repaint but they look much better now. They were badly rusted in several areas and I would have replaced them altogether if both of these rims didn't have complete and intact matching inlays running all the way around them. I did not want to try and pry those inlays off to move them to new hoops when they were glued on so well and holding up nicely. So I stuck to paint and polish for the original ones. The paint is not powder-coated, factory-applied, so of course it will chip and scratch if subjected to abuse, but plain-old, gloss-black, out-of-a-can, painted-by-hand is all I can do around here. It'll have to do unless I have a paint booth installed in the Percussion Fortress.....which ain't gonna happen. But my way looks fine in photographs.
During the course of this project I was required to track down a few hardware pieces to make this set functional again, but these obstacles were overcome in turn. These missing parts included:
The throw lever on the snare strainer assembly
This is quite often a problem with vintage Japanese snare drums. The "baseball bat"* on the strainer breaks off or comes loose and gets lost. Now you cannot tighten and loosen the snare wires. The mechanism is useless. Well, you can do like I have done in the past and spend hours and hours trying to find replacements on Ebay, or maybe even a whole assembly that still has the "bat" attached, but this is
seriously time-consuming, frustrating and often fruitless.
I have often wondered why Gibraltar, Danmar or Pearl doesn't offer a simple replacement throw lever that fits these old Japanese strainers. They provide many other useful repair and restoration parts, but nothing like this. I've even considered consulting a metal works to have a bunch of these "baseball bats" made up for fun and profit. But these things take time and intelligence and I am short on both.
Instead of that, here's a "quick fix" that gets the mechanism working again so you can avoid the Ebay option. Find what is called a "Binding Post" online or at your local hardware store. I'm not sure what it's used for in an official capacity, but it's a small aluminum fastener that looks like this:
Taking a 2-inch-long binding post, removing the "screw end" and replacing it with a standard 8-32 machine screw (because the head on the provided screw end is too fat), I can now install this post in my strainer mechanism to act as the throw lever. Note: This has to be done with the strainer completely removed from the shell. The post has to be attached to the mechanism from the back, which I really can't do without disassembling the whole thing. Since I was performing surgery on this snare anyway and had it completely apart, this didn't matter, but if I was going to perform this operation on another snare I would have to unhook the snare wires, remove the drum head and extract the strainer mechanism from the shell, which takes a bit of time. However this rapid remedy for a broken throw is worth the effort if I want the thing to actually work again and I'm not overly concerned with the lever's appearance. Most people won't even notice this clever hack and it beats spending countless hours searching for what can't easily be found.
The "T-screw" for the shell-mounted cymbal arm
I love these vintage bass drums that have a mount right on the shell to attach an "L-rod" cymbal holder. That just makes my day for some reason. That is so ding-dang convenient. So heck
yes, I am going to make sure the mount has a "T-screw" that actually works. I definitely must have a "T" for my "L" on my "BD," baby! Can't do without it! This simply involves me digging through my massive stores of wing nuts and T-screws until I find the proper one which, in this case, I totally did. And that, too, is ding-dang convenient.
Bass drum spurs
Restoring vintage Japanese drums is a whole different ballgame than just slappin' together some Slingerlands or linin' up some Ludwigs. The thing you must always remember with MIJ's is this: They ain't American. This means they may
look like drums made by USA companies but the difference is in the details. Why don't my tension rods fit these lugs? Why doesn't my T-screw fit this mount? Why don't my spurs fit this bass drum?
You see,
we might live in the grand-old USA where we live by tried-and-true American standards, but where these drums were made, they
don't. So your standard 2-inch tension rods with the good-ol' 7/32" threading that everybody uses now DON'T MEAN CRAP to a swivel nut inside a drum lug made in Japan in the 1960's. And that threaded hole in that mount doesn't have to be some standard 10-24 or 1/4-20 threading by any means. We are Japanese, if you please, and we'll make it whatever-the-heck we want, if you
don't please. And I'm not talking about a simple metric conversion here. I mean instead of a modern standard metric threading of "M5-0.8" which is difficult enough to decipher and deal with, they may have decided to go with "M5-zero-point-
NINE" just because they freakin' felt like it and darn-well can!
That's why you often hear quiet, honest and respectable men out in their workshops innocently tinkering around on these drums suddenly burst out with the most angry, racist declarations you've ever heard such as, "GOD-#@&% I HATE THE JAPANESE!!!"
So it came as NO SURPRISE WHATSOEVER that the typical 3/8" vintage-style replacement spurs that I always rely on did not fit this bass drum. No.....of course not. So I have to rummage through my stash of percussionary parts and find two
10-mm bass drum spurs, which are just a
smidgen smaller in diameter than the standard spurs found on most other drum kits. In fact, side-by-side I can hardly tell which is a 10-mm and which is a 3/8. But a 3/8" spur rod will definitely NOT fit into the 10-mm spur mount on my Japanese bass drum. No, sir. Not at all.
Because you see, children, by shaving off that infinitesimal amount of diameter on the spur rod (and other innumerable, barely-distinguishable shortcuts), the Japs saved money on metal and chrome plating so that they could undercut the prices on American-made drums. That was their strategy, and it worked well enough. That's why Pearl and Tama are the giants they are today, and Slingerland and Rogers are now gone except for the vintage remnants they left behind.
That's enough backstory and lecturing for now concerning my Bamboo Pearl Majestic kit, but there is one thing more: I did finally track down a 1967 Star Drums catalog and discovered the official name for this wrap. It was actually called "Fibre Gold Pearl," which I think is way less cool than "Bamboozled" or "Bamboo Pearl." In fact, that name is so lame I will have to pronounce it "
FEE-bray Gold Pearl" just to spice it up and make myself even more annoying than I already am. I mean come on, even "Butterscotch Brickle" was a better name. What's exciting about fibers? Oh, sorry.....
fibres. That's so classy and European. At least "Butterscotch Toffee" or "Caramel Candy" would have sounded tasty.
As an added bonus, I also found this page out of the catalog that featured a Star "Kingbeat" outfit covered with the "Fibre Gold Pearl" wrap. Seeing this professional catalog photo, I do think the finish does look rather cool, although given the other choices available I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have picked this one. I would have chosen "Blue Marine Pearl" or "Sparkling Red Pearl."
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*These levers got the nickname "baseball bats" because of Ludwig's design, which strongly resembles a miniature baseball bat. You might even say it looks like a tiny robot arm and fist holding it. To see what I mean, check out this photo of what is called a "Ludwig Baseball Bat Muffler"
and see if you agree.
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