It kinda looks like a modern free-floater, but it's a single-tension design since it doesn't appear that the batter and resonant heads can be tuned independently. In that respect, it's pretty similar mechanically to early 20th century marching drums or student drums. A whole bunch of early 1900s bass drums were single-tension drums, too.

I didn't spend too much time looking through catalogs on the Sonor Museum web site, but maybe it's a slightly newer relative of the D409 snare drum in the the 1957-58 catalog?

It`s a 1960`s COB free floating snare, because it doesn`t have the second smaller badge that has Made in Western Germany under it (or the rivit holes) it`s a European market. It`s considered an oddity !! I can`t put a D # on it and niether can SONOR !!

Incidentdly I wanna add that if you look at the pic. that I got from SONOR,..you can look up under the top hoop,..the head is centered and the revel is the same asll the way around the drum. Note the tension rods are straight up and down.

Looking at your pic. I can see the bottom head has more revel on the right than on the left of the photo, and the tension rods are not straight up and down. This takes away from the floating head system. To correct this, you simply loosen all the tension rods and center both heads around the drum to show the same revel top and bottom,..this should also straighten up the rods too !! It will also change the resonance for the better !!

Take your time,...it`s a pain in the as,..I have floating heads on mine and if you go slow,..it seems to make it easier !! Sometimes one rod will pull to it`s side while tightening,..so watch carefully !!

thanks, i hadnt had much time to mess with it before i took the pic, i eventually took it apart and went through everything to make sure it is all intact, the shell is very very thin. when i put it back together and finally got some snares on it, it sounded like pure ****, so i took the crappy ambassador clear head off of it and put on a diplomat, this made it sound alot better and i was able to effectively tune it. the snares however required some work because for some reason the holes in the rim didnt allow it to touch the head right, i changed it for the puresound snares that are pretensioned on a piece of steel (i forget what it is called), that made it sound absolutely tremendous, the drum is now a beautiful member of my 4pc 65 sonor teardrop (emerald satin flame)

The drum in the outdoor photo ended up in my collection at some point then back out on eBay about 4 or 5 years ago.

It was an interesting little drum.

Here is a closer photo of it.

David

I bet that drum sounds pretty cool. Didn't know Sonor made free floaters.

I have one of these but with both batter and snare side tension rods. I need the snare system for it. Do you know where I could find them?

how much did you end up paying for it (if you dont mind me asking)

mine looks almost exactly the same except without the smaller made in western germany badge, it just says sonor, its a unique little drum and it def gets attention when i show it off.