Joe,

It looks like a the bass drum originally had a mahogany finish. Unfortunately it has been damaged and will never look very good again no matter what you do. Plus it would more than likely be a ton of work stripping all of the paint off that many drums. If it were mine I would try some stripper on that bass drum as an experiment to see how easy or hard it is to remove the paint. If it comes off real easy and you can get the blue paint out of the grain then I would continue on the bass drum just to see how bad the damage to the original exterior ply is. If its too much work then pick a nice wrap and go with it.

As far as the three ply shells go, they are not necessarily valuable but they are desirable, seems they are preferred much more than the 6,5 ply without rings in general. Good luck, I hope you share your results with us. There are a lot of nice people here willing to give advice.

Wow, some major gashes in the drum.

I fully agree with Jeff C. And trust us he knows the refurbishing process . . . just read his posts on his donation kits.

Good luck and share what you have done.

Michael

Yep, if anyone knows wood and restoring drums, it's Jeff. I'd do what he suggests.

An easy re-wrap would be Jammin' Sam's, should you choose to go that route.

Also, there is some hardware that is not Ludwig, and it looks like the bass drum

spurs were added, giving the shell extra holes and diminishing it's value even further.

Whatever the case, these drums can still be brought back to life with a little hard work

and patience. Keep us posted !

cheers,

Rob

If those were mine, I would use some wood filler to fill in the gashes and then recover them in the wrap of your choice. If you are wanting to go the economical route (around $50) for the wrap, you could do what I did and use vinyl fabric. Here is a how to video I did: [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1HBiJJjZ6c"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1HBiJJjZ6c[/ame]