The WMP set is very interesting, noting that the snare and toms have a full count of lugs, but the bass was trimmed back to 12. Usually they will all be shorted from a top-of-the-line count. The original lemon strata set is interesting too. Someone noted an extra bass lug. I was thinking, at first, that the lugs might have been staggered. Both sets seem to have Ludwig T rods on the bass drums.
This is the first I've ever heard of Miller drums. Interesting post and thread.
the extra lug on the bass drum is one that had broken off. someone really abused these drums but besides that, which involved some damage to the hoop as the hooks are bolted to it, and a split in the wrap, I think the bass is ok. The floor tom is ok too except the split and missing wrap and 2 missing lugs. None of the 3 drums have bottom rims (hoops) and tension screws. The bottom of the tom shell is in bad shape not sure what to do about that. sorry I haven't taken any more photos yet...
I would bet these are Millers and not just added hardware
Here are some more photos hopefully help solve the mystery. The miller lugs have the same spacing as the 60's ludwig lugs.
It appears that the mounted tom was miss-drilled for one lug (see photo) and then just filled with plastic-wood. And you can see 'made in Japan' on the Tom mount. I have never seen a bass drum tom holder like this one. I am interested to hear from anyone with any thoughts about these drums
If it`s a 60`s Ludwig shell, the wrap will go under the scarf joint,..... Does it ?
In the one photo it looks like the re-ring is made of plies. Ludwig re-rings were solid maple. These don't look like typical made in Japan shells but (if I'm interpreting that one photo right) don't seem to be Ludwigs either.
The more info we get the more puzzling things become.
The wrap in the seam production detail on Ludwigs stopped at roughly the same time as the Standards were introduced. Prior to that the wrap was put on the flat plywood before it was bent into a shell. At some point (circa 1968) this was changed to wrapping the shells after they were formed. However, as I pointed out above these don't appear to be Ludwig (or Slingerland) shells, which had solid maple re-rings, not plied ones. I'm not sure what sort of Re-Rings Rogers used.
My own gut feeling is that this is an imported set with the lugs swapped out. The wrap (since these aren't Ludwig Standard shells) and the other hardware points in that direction. The shells don't look like typical MIJ shells though so who knows? If we had more information on the Miller company and what they did exactly in regards to building drums we might have an easier time figuring these out.
These do seem quite different from the other Miller set that was on Ebay but since we don't know how Miller operated it's hard to gauge the significance of that. For example, Kent drums (another smaller drum company) had lots of variations in the drums they made, different styles of lugs, different types of shells and hardware through the years. Finally ending up importing their drums. W&A was primarily a hardware manufacturer but did build drums as well. Their drums vary a lot too as they were primarily built from parts that came from the major companies (Gretsch and Rogers primarily). Apparently they would barter drum parts in return for their hardware and then build drums with whatever parts they could get. Because of this there are a lot of variations in their sets. Did Miller possibly operate in a similar fashion to either of these smaller drum companies? At the moment we don't know.
