I'm working on the photos but have run into some oddities I haven't met before. Something to do with their origin on an iPhone combined with my lack of experience with the unusual features of iPhone photos.

Meanwhile, I can report the hats look consistent oh hammering and lathing with late 50s hats and have the SSA variant of the trademark (top missing).

Just to make sure you're aware, that was only the lighter (aka top) hat. I can take photos with a boring old digital camera if you prefer.

Also kind of wondering why the lathing is so dang sharp and deep, way more so than my 60s/70s NBs. Is that just a thing in the 50s?

Pete

Photos shrunk to fit:

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-1.png[/img]

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-2.png[/img]

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-3.png[/img]

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-4.png[/img]

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-5.png[/img]

[img]http://black.net.nz/cym2017/PT-6.png[/img]

The lathing on your hats is what I'm used to seeing on cymbals from the later half of the 1950s. Multiple passes seem to be done, and with at least two different styles. There is a fine pass (small tonal groove) and a coarse pass (larger tonal groove). Your hats also show some oven crust left behind (photos 4 and 5) which happens when the lathing is not deep enough to remove all the crust. The bell also shows some lathe chatter which is another thing which is more common in the 1950s than the 1960s. Most late 1950s cymbals have fine tonal groove lathing on the top side of the bell, although this isn't matched on the bottom side of the bell. You can see the variation in bell treatment here:

http://black.net.nz/avedis/bells.html

It will be easier if I do a little annotation on your photos to show what I mean. You might need to refresh your browser to get the annotated images to appear in my previous post.

The change which happened in the 1960s is coarse tonal groove lathing over the whole bell, and less obvious differences between coarse and fine tonal groove lathing across the bot (both top and bottom). Notice this is a change in the frequency with which different lathing styles are found. It is still possible to find a cymbal which has coarse tonal groove lathing on the bell, and a late 1950s trademark stamp. Similarly it is possible to find a cymbal which has fine tonal groove lathing on the bell or bow, and has a 1960s trademark stamp. By the 1970s the lathing has changed again with larger tonal grooves which are more consistent than the 1960s. Again this is a frequency change and one can find counterexamples.

I'm not sure if this addresses your observation

and maybe it would be a good idea to see both of your New Beat hats as well.

THAT was very informative. So we're basically talking about only one possible year of manufacture here, 1957. And that would be because of the 7/16 hole (size difference is more obvious in person).

Pete

I've got the 835g bottom now. I'll ship you out some photos of whatever my camera gets near. I've also got a late 50s to early 60s 2000g crash ride as well. I'm kind of a vintage Zildjian geek. Just like the sound when I put the hammer down (ahem).

Oh, and I WILL figure out how to post photos on this site!

There isn't a way to get down to a single year based on the evidence we currently have. I always add a "plus or minus two years" to every estimate in my mind. I just don't always write down 1957±2 to 1959±2 every time. But even that is a simplified shorthand, and the 1957 and 1959 years are even less certain than that. I've even seen Bill Hartrick say "maybe as late as 1960 or 1961" on occasion for Small Stamps. And if Large Stamps were really only in use in 1955-1957 (no overlap with Small Stamps) there are a lot of them given they were only in use for 3 years. We don't know first year of use in the factory, nor last year of use in the factory. We don't know how long cymbals were rested between manufacture and stamping, although evidence suggests it may be more than a year in some cases, and may go up to 7 years or so (again not yet accurately estimated). When cymbals were stamped they were stamped with whatever was in use on the day. When a year comes from somebody recalling a year of purchase new (decades after the fact) we don't know how long the cymbal sat in the warehouse or in the retail shop. The current record is decades of time lag between manufacture and sale as a new cymbal. Read about it here:

http://www.vintagedrumforum.com/showthread.php?t=53314

If we had hundreds of examples with impeccable provenience of first purchase we might be able to graph out the patterns and start to see the variation. But we don't have hundreds of examples we can check. We don't even know how many cymbals the proposed years are based on. We just have some proposed years.

We can be reasonably confident of the general ordering for the timeline (with the proviso that the pre Trans Stamps aren't fully documented yet, and the apparent oddity of the "1954 stamp" is not yet fully explained) but that's not the same thing as being able to attach exact years to the first and last year of use for each die stamp in the factory. It's just not as simple as that, although we sometimes speak as if it is.

All photos happily received but no rush. Just when it is convenient.

To rephrase - it seems that we're talking about Zildjian production fuzziness. I guess they figured who would care about any of this?

There are few hard changeovers and numerous examples of one time period bleeding into the next.

At least I CAN say this for certain: they're great sounding cymbals and I can't find anything new like them at Sam Ash or the Guitar Center.

Pete