[COLOR="DarkRed"]I have never been impressed by older Gretsch edges to begin with...so I suppose it is possible that it is factory.

I do agree with your drum guy, it won't negatively impact anything since it's a snare side. In instances like this, I sometimes just do a light sanding or the outer and inner lip by hand, just to round it a tad. But as long as the beds still exist, I don't foresee it being a problem, IMHO....[/COLOR]

My Gretsch snare is like that....thats the snare beds.....they used to use a HUGE belt sander to cut those beds into the shells......kind of gorilla like, but it works.

Thanks alot guys.

I appreciate the info.

Any purpose built snare drum of that era would have had snare beds intentionally sanded out of the bearing edge surface of the resonant side.

This certainly was not a defect - it was done to allow the snares to stretch tightly across the bottom head.

The tricky part is trying to turn one of these old snares back into a Tom.

That involves trying to build the snare bed back up to the proper height and then "hand crafting" the bearing edge surface and angles.

I am currently working on this kind of project to resurrect an old 10x14 marching snare into a fourth tom for my jazz kit (8x12/9x13/10x14/16x16).

So far, it's working out great. I just bought new heads and got the lug casings polished and rebuilt (including new spring felts - which is a new level of detail for me).

Now it's time to buy new wrap and put this thing back together.