Hi all,

Here's another snare drum to enter the collection. This drum was acquired through DFO (drumforum.org). It's kind of cool; guys start a thread and people respond. The owner questioned what he should do with this snare drum so I weighed in and said: "sell it to me"... Bada bing, bada boom, done deal! Now if all drum deals were that easy...

1920s WILSON GOLD PLATED/WHITE LACQUER 4x14 SEPARATE TENSION THUMB-ROD SNARE DRUM

The Shell:

The 4x14 shell looks to be solid maple with maple reinforcement rings. There is no badge but there is a Leedy-esque black grommet. There is a very nice and excellently preserved Wilson Bros. Mfg. Co., Chicago tag directly opposite the grommet. The outside is white lacquer that had accumulated 85+ years of dirt, grime and assorted schmutzes of yesteryear. A light cleaning and polishing compound brought some life back to the white lacquer.

The Hardware:

I'm always a sucker for gold plated hardware. The gold plated hardware also had a fair amount of dirt, grime and schmutz but my trusty 3-in-1oil (thank you George Way) cleaned everything up nicely while still keeping the "age" of the hardware intact. A special thanks goes out to my friend, fellow DFO Forumite and fellow collector Stephen Traversi for supplying me with the parts I needed to complete the strainer, Stephen saved the day! Another special thanks goes to Les Hadnagy of Avenue Plating for matching up the gold plating on the newly acquired strainer parts. Les left all of the "age" on the parts that he gold plated and this blended nicely with the original gold plating. Unfortunately calf heads didn't work on the drum. The calf heads went on fine but the thumb-rod tuning threads maxed out way before the heads were sufficiently tightened so I had to use modern day heads that sat higher therefore allowing more thread room in the top claw for the thumb-rod threads to catch. So much for authenticity. Notice the thumb-screw washers, they are made out of calf, kind of cool, I never saw that before. The butt plate is the tray style as we have seen on late-teens and early 1920s L&L snare drums. Silk-wound wires rounded out this restoration. This is by far, not my favorite tensioning system.

Without getting into a graduate thesis on the workings of the Wilson separate tension thumb-rod mechanism, allow me to just summarize. Wilson stresses the importance of being able to individually adjust (tighten/loosen) the top and bottom heads and points out that simultaneous tensioning will result in the bottom (snare) head tightening up quicker because of the thinness of the slunk head as compared to the thicker batter ("beater" as Wilson says) head. Here is where that little "lock wheel" near the bottom flesh hoop comes into play. The threaded thumb-rod slides through the bottom lug and screws into the top claw, so this is where your simultaneous (top and bottom) tuning takes place. Turning the lock wheel downward and securing it to the top of the bottom flesh hoop will cause the bottom tuning to be locked therefore allowing additional tightening of the top head. Release the thumb wheel and you are back to the simultaneous tuning mode. There you have it, a bit crude, not anywhere near the Gladstone tuning or traditional separate tensioning but still better than single tensioning, I guess.

Enjoy!

Mike Curotto