I bought some old drums from a classmate recently. They have been sitting in a corner of the school hall for a year, then spent half a year being used in the hostel music studio until the 8-year-old skins broke. Then they just sat in a corner of the studio for another year or so until I rescued them.

Decided to take some of them home and refinish some to match my kit. My set has sizes 10-12-14-20; this set is 12-13-16-22 so I took the 13 and 16 toms and the 22 bass. I'm helping my friend to sell the rest.

Last week:









Urghhh I had to chase out families of spiders. I mean, literally, there were big spiders and what looks like clusters of their kids, and flies hanging around in webs. Thankfully the living ones volunteered to vacate, I had to wash out the dead ones. Rusting on the toms was horrible too. Thankfully only the toms were hit by the pollution and infestation. I think it's because of the broken skins that let in moisture and spiders. Glad there weren't millipedes, they sometimes manage to sneak into the studio.

Let this be a lesson to you. Never ever let your drumset fall into this condition. I'm also glad that the stands, while a little rusty, worked perfectly. The rubber gaskets (is this the right word?) separating the compartments saved the insides of the stands, and somehow the outsides were tarnished but not heavily rusted. It seems like the rust is really picky, attacking only some parts.

I've never seen the salt gathering on the inside of the lugs like that, either.

So, after a week of hard work polishing, sanding, dyeing and lacquering to match my current equipment...






I currently don't have the budget to replace the skins on the new components. Sadly, the skins that came with it (stock pearl heads) had broken batters. So I am playing them without resos, using the reso as a batter. To make up for their thin-ness, I cut out circles from a broken skin to make "power dot" heads. The sound is (surprisingly) quite acceptable, although I can't wait to get new skins at the end of the year. It's good enough for now.

Suddenly upgrading to having so many pieces is really fun! But it makes positioning a pain in the ass. It'll probably take me a few days or weeks to settle down to something really comfortable.

you did a great job refinishing those drums, hopefully you can replace those heads before too long and get them sounding as good as they look!

Probably in around two months or so. The largest music store here has a storewide half-price sale twice a year, I'm waiting for that. After going for one of those sales, you just don't feel like buying anything for the rest of the year unless it's really urgent. I could definitely wait those two months.

yeah, it's hard to pay for something that you know will be much cheaper soon.

hmmm, id like information on your finishing process, mostly the laquer part, you did a great job and i wanna mess around with an old kit of mine i was refinishing

Hmm I posted a guide on a local music forum, here:

http://soft.com.sg/forum/gear-drums/828 ... h-diy.html

Personally, I feel that I could have done a better job on the lacquering, actually. There's many people around pdf who did amazing jobs on their drumsets too.