I have a set of those resin shelled Tactons stacked in a corner , behind a bunch of other stacks of wood shelled drums. The room is generally unheated, or heated very low, in winter. They are somewhat of a forgotten kit; although complete, because being a horrible orange sort of metallic finish-----very 80's, I don't like to look at them. I will eventually get to them. They have been there for about 2 years and as summer rolls around and the room warms up, every year as I go into that room, I find myself checking my shoes to see if I have stepped in dog ****...... and then I remember those drums. The gassing off resin really does smell like that.

So Tactons are Sonor Right?

Did not know they did a phenolic shell.

What year are these......pleese.?

scott

No. Tacton was a nationalized Lefima successor who since 1966 to 1969 was transfered from Markneuekirchen to Trowa (former Sonor factory) in Weißenfels. Bankrupted in 1991.

This kind of set was produced from 1970 to near 1984.

Cheers,

George.

When the Link family, who owned Sonor left for West Germany in 1950, the factory ,all the tooling and presumably most of the workers stayed behind, so the East German gov't had a nationalized going concern , left in their hands. The first drums out of this factory were called Trowa and the early ones bore a lot of similarity to the later 40's Sonors, some probably identical. Sonor got back into business in the west in 1952 but it was not until about 1955 that the new factory and a new direction was at hand. The early Sonor drums from the west and the early 50's Trowas still bore great similarities. It was still the same people from the old Sonor envisioning them.

There was a forced merger between Lefima( family owned since the 1860's) and Trowa( TROmmelfabrik Weissenfells A.g.) in the east( around 1960?---you know for sure, George?) and for a while the two labels were almost identical but eventually the two were fused under the brand Tacton ( translation: beat-time). Trowa ceased to exist and Lefima reemerged (as Sonor had done) in the west , primarily as an orchestral and marching drum company.

Curiously , Trowa and then Tactons, continued to bear a great deal of similarity to Sonor. There is evidence of outright copying of design( lugs) but then the Sonor lugs that Tacton copied were in fact kind of a copy of Ludwig lugs anyway. More likely , for the most part, the designers of Trowa and Tacton were some of the same people who had worked at Sonor until 1950 and they held true to a certain design ethic.These were after all German drums and anyone can tell them at a glance, so there must be a clear German percussion design ethic.

The phenolic resin shell drums that Tacton made by the way, are not characteristic of Tacton or Trowa or Lefima for that matter. They are a time capsule , a testament to a brief period of economic collapse of a society that briefly existed and fell due to the megalamania of it's overlords. East Germany had no China to transfer it's production to but actually tried to keep people working and pay the bills. Despite the fact that the quality of the drums was very good, their market was small and the logistics of a managed economy in a pre-computer world was an overwhelming component of the economic plan. By necessity the drums had to have less labour input and one way to do this was to have a machine made formed shell.

Most of the wood drums I have seen ( I own 4 kits and about 10 orphans), are of a high build quality...hand made drums actually , with beech shells and quality hardware. Nickel and later chrome plating was excellent , until later when straight chrome on steel became more common. The 50's drums are exceptionally beautiful and well built , with elegant and playfull design flourishes on the lugs , T -rods and locking wingnuts. The wraps were the same--not cheap copies, the very same wraps used by Sonor, Trixon, Tromsa, that super high quality , deep ,glossy nitrocellulose made mostly by Deutsche Celluloid and shipped across the west/east border.

They made their own heads and if there is to be a fault found with the Trowa to Tacton drum era, it is with the heads. Now, while many of the earlier drums featured fine calf heads from Altenburger, the plastc heads were thin and possibly not mylar. They were serviceable but the drums come to life with any of the mylar heads produced since 1957.

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Please tell me what kind of a drum?

Hi Sergey and Welcome to this great forum.

Oh...! mamma mia... It's a rarest earlier Tacton snare from after Lefima era.

This drum is from the same line as an original floor tom what you killed some time ago when to remade it with modern hoops and other parts...

Strainer mechanic is the same as Tromsa use on parallel snares (and similar Trixon type).

The next serie after conic lugs as yours was followed with stamped hoops and beautiful Trixon-shaped lugs (I suppose that they were supplied from Rimmel).

Congrats, Sergey --- after restoring it will be a great sounding snare!

I hope that it be done...

Cheers,

George.

I did not find any videos with such lags. Are they produced a couple of days?

I'm sorry, it's translator.