by Joe Partridge Jr.
Cleveland drummer Mell Csicsila sent this repair job to me via George’s Drum Shop. It is a Slingerland 7×14 single ply maple snare drum wrapped in white marine pearl and my new found friend Rob Cook assessed that the drum was manufactured between 1940 and 1955.
The drum was obviously exposed to a good deal of moisture, probably on a shelf in a basement for quite a while with the heads fully tensioned, resulting in shell distortion and cracking. The lugs caved the shell in at the top and pulled the shell out at their bottom but the re-rings were in fine shape and fairly round. The hardware is in fair shape, but very dirty. There is more pitting and rust on one side of the drum than the other, apparently due to damp exposure more on one side than on the other. The interior of the shell has rust stains around most of the screw holes. The top hoop was bent on one side due obviously to stick contact. The bottom hoop was fine other than the snare gates were loose at the rivets. The butt plate mechanism was bent fairly badly as if the drum had been dropped on it and the throw-off lever was typically broken off. The badge had been removed and was quite shiny, leading me to believe that the drum might have been recovered. However, the WMP wrap was the old acetate-based covering with a very small overlap at the seam which was centered between two lugs. Rob seemed to think that someone may have removed the badge just to clean it. He’s probably right but why would someone go to that kind of trouble?
First, I removed the hardware, which I soaked thoroughly in light oil (WD40). Then I removed the covering, which came off fairly easily, another indication it might have been original. The next thing I did was build the steam boxes and the forms to reshape the shell.
The boxes and the forms conformed to the inside and outside diameters of the shell. The first steaming is to remove the distortion that the lugs created under tension. The steam box covers one-quarter of the shell’s diameter, thus spanning two sets of lugs per steaming. Depending on the amount of distortion, I steamed the outside of the shell for one to two minutes and then clamped that section in the forms for about thirty minutes until the shell cooled. 
You would think the steaming would take longer but the wood was very dry at this point and the steam is entering through the end grain of the wood via the holes and not just the wood surface. 
When steaming around the scarf joint I made sure not to steam the entire joint inside and out so as not to compromise the shell. I will assume by the fact that the glue at the scarf joint re-adhered when cooled that they used hide glue. After completing that process, parts of the shell’s middle bellied out slightly in a few areas and required the second steaming process. I then steamed the inside of the shell with the interior box and clamped the exterior form to the re-rings to flatten out the outside of the drum.
After allowing the shell to cool 24 hours, I repaired the cracks in the shell with CA glue (cyanoacrylate = super glue). During the steaming, the cracks swelled and were diminished in size a great deal - most of them closed up completely. I then sanded the shell smooth and flat, starting with 100 grit and then 150. I then re-drilled all the holes, as the steaming decreases the hole sizes due to swelling.
I recovered the shell with new WMP, teak-oiled the inside (teak oil penetrates hardwoods much better than tung oil) and then re-installed the badge.
I tightened the bottom hoop snare gate rivets with a small ball-peen hammer, and I hammered out the top hoop distortion with a leather mallet. These hoops are brass and are quite malleable.
I straightened out the butt plate mechanism using a piece of half-inch Baltic birch cut to the width of the interior of the butt plate. (See photo) I screwed the butt plate through the lever hole to the plywood and clamped it to a vise. Using a leather mallet, 
I was able to reshape the butt plate to its original form. Using 0000 steel wool soaked in oil, I cleaned all the grime off of the hardware and hoops. Soaking the steel wool in oil is like wet-sanding–it reduces the possibility of scratching and dulling the finish. Using a soft buffing wheel on my lathe, 
with a fine compound, I then buffed all of the parts to a high luster. Using too hard of a buffing wheel increases the chance of removing the plating. I then used Windex to remove the compound residue and reassembled the drum.
*George Lawrence (George’s Drum Shop) notes - When I received the drum back from Joe it looked like an 8 or 9 out of ten instead of a 2 or 3 out of ten. I ordered a replacement throw off handle from JP2 creations and put some new heads and Puresound RK snares on it, and it tuned up like a charm with that great old Radio King burp of a sound. Very nice job, Joe.
Joe Partridge is a professional drum repairman, an artist of wood sculptures and owner of Famous Drum Company. He can be reached at jepartridgejr@gmail.com or search for Joe E. Partridge, Jr at facebook.com.
