Photographic evidence

Also, anyone have any idea why these photos get rotated when I post them? They are correctly oriented on my computer and iPhone.

Looks to me you better plan on painting, tung oil will never look good.

No advice on getting the remaining blotches out, but I will just throw out that I am a fan of period-appropriate finishes on vintage drums.

If it had a paint finish, paint it.

Vintage shells that have been stripped and natural finishes applied remind me of the '70's craze for stripping and finishing furniture, which resulted in a whole lot of honey-tinted paint-grade softwood.

I also love 2-tone Duco, so if it were me, I would go that route. I've gotten good results spraying the black layer in Rustoleum black lacquer. Shoot the first coat, dry overnight, sand with 500 grit, shoot again, and you're ready for the stripe.

I'm in the middle of doing up a Taiwan cheapo kit in 2-tone. I have a turntable and an airbrush, black lacquered the shells, just trying to work up the skills/courage to shoot the gold stripe.

Thanks Jeff C and Erik.

I agree with you, Erik. The black gloss would be period correct (my current 16 floor tom with the WFL kit is a trans-badge in original black gloss duco). I might just hold off until I find a 24 bass drum and match it as well in the two-tone. The results others have had with the turntable are impressive, but I don't have the space for a setup like that. I am pretty good with a rattle can though from years of stencil art.

I did a Duco job once and it was not that good. Wish I would have never agreed to to it. I know the guy was unhappy, he was just too nice to admit it. He sold the drums, that should be a clue.

I know this does not help you, I have seen very good results with spray paint and a turn table though.

Thanks Jeff. It does help. I was hoping you might chime in on this, as I've seen your refubs and think you do exceptionally beautiful work.

I don't think your duco was bad. I've seen the bad out there elsewhere online. But I do think we are used to seeing pretty great work from the duco era when skilled painters were painting these all day. They just really got it down (most of the time).

Hoops are in the same stained condition. So gloss black on the shell with black, white or red hoops? Those are the colors I've seen done from the 50's. Although there may be more rare examples.

Glad you're going to paint it!

What I I always run into when stripping wood for repainting is that the bare wood looks so beautiful even with its blotches that I invariably (unless it's lauan) start thinking about a trans finish.

I've done a guitar finish that I call mother-of-tinkertoy that involves a color stain with wipe-on gunstock finish. So far done guitars in green, red, and black transparent and they look great. Transparent satin is how it comes out.

John "Purdie Shuffle" has a photo of a kit he did himself with rattle cans, a 2-tone gold-on-green that looks great.

Jeff, I'm curious what trouble you ran into doing the 2-tone finish? My concern is that I don't want to screw up the nice black lacquer coats I've already put on the bass, snare, and tom.

Well, I went about it in a complicated manner. I could not get my gun adjusted right, the foggy edge was, well, too foggy. The owner wanted a straight line, not a wavy one like you see sometimes. And the trouble with using the products that I use is the maximum thickness of finish recommend. You cant just spray as many coats as you want, it has to be done without building it too thick. I already had two coats of primer to fill in the grain and cover all of his plugged holes. Then I had to spray the black, then a finish coat, so I really needed to do this in one coat of each to stay within the recommended specs.

So, after the two coats of primer I sprayed the center band first.

Now, back to the foggy edge. I ended up building a brace to hold my gun steady and set the air cap in a vertical position, sprayed a 1" or so wide band of paint with minimal fog to create the transition from black to center color. Then moved the gun brace down and sprayed the remaining black color. Where the two black colors met was the problem. It was worst in the picture below. Some of the drums turned out much better. From a few feet away you could not notice it but it certainly was far from perfect.