what makes you think they were intended to be hi hats and not just two 16" crash cymbals? those would be huge hihats and i've never heard of anyone using hats that big. certainly not 50's jazz where kits were getting smaller.

my 2 cents ,there is not enough weight difference between the two to be a matched hihat pair....someone may have put the two together and used them as a hi hat pair do they show real smooth useon the edges where they would have clicked together?

Mike just informationally it wasn't until A Zildjian put out the new beats in the late 1960's that the extreme separation between the top and bottom hats became popular.

A bunch of theories I've heard regarding cymbals on the 1930s-1950s were that Zildjian just picked the next 2 of whatever diameter you were looking for off of the shelf and they became a pair of hats. And theory 2 is that they actually tried to mate a pair based on similar weights. But not by using a gram scale or anything that sophisticated it was simply ok this one seems light and so does this one. Put them together.

Another thing to note is that most of the early hihats were intended as marching or orchestral cymbals were matching weights is important to the sound quality of the crash when played by hand. Which is why you see a lot of heavy small diameter Ks from the 1950s. They weren't intended to be hats when they were made.

Its taken me quite a few years to find the right set of hihats and I've probably owned about 25-30 pairs of vintage A's (1930-1950) and Ks and the majority of them were within 150 grams of each other.

Thats Absolutly Right, I got a pair of 16"Istanbul K's Myself....and they have been together for about hmmmm, when they leaved the factory. Perfectly matched by the guys at the turkish cymbal factory,