Greetings,
I picked these up locally for a good price. Believe it or not, this is actually my first Export kit. Seems I would have run across one at some point in the past, but never have.
I found this .pdf (attached below) on the Pearl Drummer's Forum. Looks like mine are the ELX series from either 1983, 1984 or 1985 in #121 Walnut Lacquer Finish. According to the document, the shells are 8 ply with 6 ply mahogany with a birch inner and outer. The outer looks like birch for sure, but the inner ply......that ain't birch! It looks and feels like particle board or MDF. Also, I'm only counting 6 plies at most. Please check out the photos. The outer birch ply with the walnut gloss lacquer looks great and is in good shape on all the drums (obviously needs cleaned/polished). One other thing to note, in the last photo (#4) you can see that the shell has slightly flattened out where the lugs are. It's pretty easy to see when you look at the circle on the underside of the Remo Pinstripe head and compare. That would not happen with birch!
I also posted my pictures and started a thread at the Pearl Drummers Forum as well, so we'll see what info I get from there. Even though all you fine folks have much more knowledge! :) The .pdf I found on the Pearl Forum is ten pages, but I had to cut it down to one to get it to upload here. On Page 2 it notates the same exact columns for 1984 and 1985 for the ELX. For 1986, the ELX was discontinued for the World Series (not baseball). They were resurrected in 1996. The document also states that the ELX, from both 1983-1985 and from 1996-2003, were the only Export models that came with wood bass drum hoops and lacquer finishes.
These are intriguing. It's a five piece with no snare. 8/10/13/16/22. Even with beat up, crappy heads that haven't seen a drum key in Lord knows how long, the 13" and 16" sound very full and thunderous with no tweaking at all.
I'm looking forward to finding out more about them. But as for now, I pose the question:
What are the shells actually made of?
V