Hello ol'chaps, not looking for much advice but just thought I'd share something with you. This is also my first restoration job so comments would be appreciated.
Sometime last year I picked up an old 1925 Hawkes and Son bass drum for just £30 on eBay. It was covered in this horrible white paint and who ever did this also decided to paint the all ready silver hardware; silver. But it had such a beautiful sound so I decided that I would strip the paint off and give it a better look.
Stripping the paint took much longer then I would have wanted it too but after the hoops and shell had been done it was all ready looking much better. It was a shame I had to strip it though because there was all ready a really nice stain underneath the white paint; and also a dark green and gold line across the shell, it would have been nice if I could have kept that but the white paint simply had to come off.
After that was done the hardware next had to be stripped of the silver paint, that was all fairly simple but it looks like the paint has reached into the thread so I still need to look at that more and probably strip that harder.
My main current problem at the moment is that the flesh hoops have also been painted white and I'm quite nervous about using stripper to get it off as I don't want to crack the hoop in the process. Does anybody know of another way I could perhaps get it off delicately?
Once all the stripping was done it was time to stain and finish and it came out beautifully. I decided to just give the hoops a dark stain with one coat of Danish and just give the shell two layers of Danish too.