Wow, that's wild. I had no idea Ludwig (or Slingerland) developed anything like this. I'm guessing they were designed as student level? I'm so curious to hear how they sounded, and see if they over-delivered in the way the snares did.

I cannot comment on the legitimacy of the Ludwig "Acrolite" set, but the gold set has NOT been established to be genuine "Slingerland" or a "prototype".

True. But given the exact same construction as the early Slingerland aluminum snare drums, and one Slingerleedy aluminum snare drum that I have seen that has the same pebble finish and construction, just not with the gold anodizing, Add to that Slingerland's penchant for copying Ludwig, I think there is a high probability that it is genuine Slingerland so it has not been ruled out either.

What is the estimated build date for the Ludwig Acrolite drum set?

Well, the Acrolite first shows up in the spring '62 Ludwig Drummer issue. The description and the same picture is used through the '63 Ludwig New Product catalog. This is for the pebble finish aluminum shell with folded over edges, rolled shell with butt seam with welded in reinforcement plate and the aluminum hoops. Baseball bat muffler and p83. The '63/64 catalog shows what we know as the Acrolite. Seamless shell, standard triple flange hoops and chrome hardware.

The lore is that these early Acrolites were all prototypes but I don't believe this is the case. Especially since there is ad copy describing and showing the pebble finish shell. If there were any Acrolite prototypes, they would be the ones with the standard Imperial lugs and small round knob muffler. This makes sense since it required no tooling to be made. Just bending, rolling, bead rolling and welding some off the shelf aluminum sheet. Ludwig made their own hoops so they could just make them out of aluminum. Everything else was off the shelf parts. To go into production, they had to have the notched bowtie lug tooling made. For this reason, I believe any prototype Acrolite would have to have been the Imperial lug, small round muffler drums.

So assuming the imperial lug Acrolites were actually prototypes, then this might have been as early as middle to late '61 given the mufflers. So the Acrolite drum set prototype was probably built within this time frame.

Hopefully there will be more and better detailed pictures posted of the gold kit but there is hardware visible on that kit that is uniquely 50's. As far as the construction of these two kits is concerned, it is fairly ubiquitous. There is nothing particularly unique or proprietary. Most any metal shop tasked with building a metal drum would probably produce something very similar. As you stated 'just bending, rolling and some welding'.

Yes it is standard metal shop methods used for those drums. What you are discounting is that Slingerland had a specific way of doing them and Ludwig had their own specific way of doing theirs.

Slingerland used the narrow strip with plug welds in the center of the strip starting at the intersection of the butt joint at the edge tying the folded over "re-ring" to the strip. This gold kit duplicates every detail exactly.

Ludwig used a wider strip made from the same shell material with two plug welds, one for each side of the butt joint and some wider welding on the butt joint and "re-ring". There were some variations on this but they all had the wide strip and the plug welds on each half and wider welding on the re-ring. My first gen acrolite has alternating plug welds, not side by side, and the weld doesn't extend up the re-ring butt joint but still fits the basic build specs.

Could someone have a drum kit made using the exact same specs? Sure. But the internet didn't exist until the 90s and these early aluminum snares are very rare. The only network of vintage drum enthusiasts would have been by mailing list, word of mouth, or perhaps some sort of club, maybe with a newsletter. These details would be very hard to come by. The chances of someone coming up with the exact brand specific build specs on their own is pretty hard to fathom. Someone would have had to have owned or at least seen one of their brands aluminum snares, or at least seen one, and specified the build specs to the sheet metal shop.

As to the aluminum Slingerlands, what parts are uniquely 50s? The push button floor tom leg brackets show up as the "new push button legs" in the no 61 catalog. The Ray McKinley rail mount came in two versions. The version in the 55 catalog has the version with four hole mounting with separate mounting plates at the bottom each end of the "hot dog". It changed by the 61 catalog to the two hole mounting with the single bent bracket that bolted to the ends of the hotdog. This style continued at least as far as to catalog 67 which was copyrighted 1965.

These later details are what I see on the aluminum kit. This puts this kit in the early 60's or very late 50's. at the very earliest and as far as '65.

I've never studied Slingerland drums, nor Ludwig Acrolites, but this thread reminded me of a story that Bill Ludwig III has told, in regards to the intense competition between Bill Ludwig II and "Bud" Slingerland....Reportedly, Bill II decided to "dumpster dive" behind the Slingerland factory on a weekend, to see if he could gain any clues as to what designs, materials, prototypes that Slingerland might be experimenting with. Bill II invited his son to come along to assist, but Bill III refused. I found that interesting also.

Regards, mb

I think I have heard the opposite. I suspect they both did it.

Ludwig invented and patented the triple flange hoop. Slingerland bent the top edge inward rather than outward resulting in the Stick Saver hoop. Ludwig sued for patent infringement and Slingerland ultimately prevailed.

It's easy to see a lot of copycatting between both companies.