If I remember the marketing of their drums ,one of the points they made was the consistency of fiberglass over wood shelled drums .(along with the tensile strength of steel).The antique copper that I have is just different sounding than all of my others .I've tried different heads and hoops.Nope ,just a softer sounding snare than all of the others. Unique,but just not the classic Fibes snare sound.My Corders have sharper attack.
... and you do remember correctly! That was indeed part of their marketing approach. Thing is .. and I think you may agree here .. that was 50 some odd years ago, plus! My point being, there just wasn't the tech to maintain that level of consistency .. plus .. much of the build operation on these drums was by hand. That immediately creates issues with drum to drum consistency. That said though, fiberglass, was still more consistent drum to drum then wood could ever be, wood being a natural type material. Today .. and Jenkins Martin comes to mind here .. I suspect they ARE very consistent from drum to drum, and certainly more so than the Fibes of old. As we were discussing hoops ... I currently have/play four Fibes SFT 690's .. two in COF .. one in White Laminate, which was a salesman's sample/demo! .. and one in Black FiVel. Only two have Fibes OEM hoops. Two I changed out because I had to ... the OEM hoops were that bad! Good grief! An addendum as I just saw the vid you put up of the Fibes "resto" ...
... well, I was on board the whole way!, until he changed out the throw! Hmmmmm ... a properly set up SFT throw/butt functions like butter!, and is incredibly easy to dial in as well as very articulate what with the snares that run across the entire resonant head. At least he drilled NO HOLES in doing so, and the drum could be returned to OEM very easily. Still, it does boggle one a bit!
Tommyp
