hmm...well, to me they sound like
tama starclassic maples and
Yamaha absolute maples. Lots of attack, moderate sustain and just a nice tone overall. I put my floor tom (it's floating) right next to
a tama starclassic maple and they sounded about the same, but I think mine sounded a little better, maybe due to the 2 extra plies.
The project cost me around 7 or 8 hundred bucks.
I started out by ordering the shells from precisiondrum.com. These are keller maple shells found in various high end drum manufacturers like OCDP, Pork Pie, etc. I don't think DW uses keller shells. buy anywhoo, I ordered the shells with bearing edges and no reinforcement rings. If you send precisiondrum.com a lug, they can drill holes for you at extra cost, but to save on cost I drilled my own holes for my lugs. Plus, I wanted the lugs to be offset a bit cuz I kinda like that look.
Precision Drum says their shells are "pre-sanded" but they really need to be sanded starting out with a 200ish grain sandpaper and I worked my way up to a 600 grain sandpaper so the wood was smooth as a baby's bum. After sanding, I drilled the holes.
Drilling holes is no easy task. I sat around thinking of ways to figure out the distance between each lug (you have to be pretty exact because they have to match up with the holes on your rims). This is easy. Just grab some of mom's sewing measuring tape and measure the circumference. NOTE: you cannot calculate circumference by multiplying diameter times pi because a 8x12 drum is not exactly 12 inches in diameter as I found out. So just divide the circumference by the number of lugs on the drum and that will give you the distance between each lug. I had two hole lugs so it was very important to have my lugs square with the top of the drum. If it's not square or even slightly off, your lugs will look crooked. I thought and thought of ways to get the lugs square and lined up perfectly and I devised a technique of using a T-square. I lined up the T-square one side on the bearing edges and one side on the side of the drum and drew a line on the side of the drum. This gave me a perfect squared line which I could then drill holes on that line for the lugs. To offset the bottom lugs 50%, I just measured them over halfway.
The finish I chose was a hand rubbed tung oil. Formby's (?) tung oil did the job. I put that stuff on really thin and sanded with 1500 grain sandpaper (in the automotive dept. of Walmart) between coats. The final coat got a real light 2000 grain sanding. The result was a pretty professional looking finish. It doesn't have a high luster a lacquer would, but if you've ever seen a guitar neck that has tung oil on it, that's what the finish looks like.
You can achieve professional finish results if you know someone that has an air compressor and the proper paint parts and paint to hook up to it. I imagine you would also need a rather large buffing wheel with various polishing waxes as well if you wanted a bright luster.
It was a fun project and I actually decided to do this instead of purchase a set of tama starclassics.
