Thanks Fellas,

It has been a labour of love indeed but besides a good cleaning and tucking a few heads, there wasn't really much to do.

For its 80 years, the set was still in very good condition. Most amazing is how well the wrap survived. Zero fading and hardly a scratch,...

The pedal, L-arms, hi-hats and cymbals are nice to display with the kit but are absolutely not suitable to play. I also wouldn't advice to bring the boxed in floor tom + basket to a gig. The bas drum and snare however are perfectly playable and actually sound pretty good.

Aaron, the bass is indeed a 26" and the only shell with standard size. The snare and tom are 12,5".

Every day, I'm founding out more info on the Marius Renatus brand. Once I collected some more peaces of the puzzle, I promise to post it on this great forum.

A good evening to y'all from a snow white and freezing Antwerp Belgium.

Stef

Beautiful kit and great job cleaning it up!

Kotz Tone Cajones have established themselves as the premier manufacturer of professional cajones (box drums) due to the resonant sheet of very thin wood on the back of the drum. This provides the discriminating player resonant and rich tones not achievable on other box drums. Most other cajon makers put the sound hole in the back. I wonder if the bottom of the drum is as resonant as the fixed bottom heads on early toms. I've seen Jay Bellerose playing a really old Slinger Rolling Bomber kit with fixed bottom heads and it sounds amazing.

Brian

Great info Brian,

I've never played fixed heads.

What I can say is that the ply wood used on this tom isn't very thin and there isn't a lot of resonance going on. (almost nothing to my feel and ears) In fact when you hit the top head, no matter how you tensioned it, it feels rather dead and sounds dull. It also requires a different way of playing as your stick doesn't bounce back like on a regular drum. The volume is about half of that of a normal tom.

Well that's just too bad. It would be wonderful if that beautiful floor Tom sounded as good as it looked:)

Brian