My 4-piece LA set has the number 780 written with a thick red permanent marker on the re-rings of every shell.

On my LA snare it has the number 1227 written with a finer black marker.

On other LA sets I've seen stamped numbers like in picture 3.

Your photo three are like the numbers I have seen. My orphans have stamps on 2 of the 4 and my original owner kit is just like your LA snare but the number is 1271 in all five shells.

So this must be some kind of lot number or other sequence number of some type used during manufacturing I am thinking.

I've mainly seen (and had) drums with the hand-written marker numbers...I've yet to find anyone who knows what they actually meant but they're not uncommon and must be "factory", as common and consistent as they are (as much as you can call something with no apparent pattern "consistent").

No doubt in my mind that these numbers are "factory".

I guess it must have been the easiest way for the Camco workers to keep the shells of one particular order together during assembly.

What surprises me though is to see that whoever did this, sort of besmirched those unique and meticulously crafted shells with whatever pencil, marker or stamp he or she could find in the shop.

There just seems to be to many instances of these numbers showing up, so unless someone is running around the world putting stamped ink and written numbers on a bunch of Camco's I tend to agree with you that these are a factory number of some type.

I am glad that I have not removed any of them on my drums and will leave them just the way they are.

I did check this morning and my #1271 hand written is in a fine line marker not pencil, as first thought, l as I touched it with an eraser and it is ink. My font on the numbers looks identical to the one in your photo so it must have been the same employee writing the number.

The picture with the number 1227 is the inside of the AC Blue 5" snare drum that I bought on Ebay USA. Why would somebody import a Camco snare from the US in the mid seventies to put a number 7 with tick mark over here in Belgium, then export it back to the US for me to import it back into Europe a year ago?

Don't think so,....

The clear interiors shown in picture 2 and 3 are not sanded down and belong to probably the nicest examples of Camco LA Drums around.

They're seem to be lots of examples with 3 or 4 digit numbers on the re-rings of LA drums and often with the same curly hand writing as it seems.

There are plenty of Americans that do that to the number 7, not just Europeans. I've also had a few examples of non lacquered interiors of LA drums.LA Camco ran for 4-5 years so I'm sure they were tweaking things a bit over those years. As for the pen versus ink versus stamp. I'm sure they just grabbed whatever they had at the time.

3 minutes search on google and 2 more LA shells with 3 digit numbers,...

Roger, are you saying that every single one of LA those shells with numbers on them at a certain point were sanded, refurbished, stripped, re-lacquered, etc....??

What about that tick marked 7 imported from the US? Doesn't make sense to me,... those numbers were written or stamped in the US and where else than in The LA Camco factory?

Just dragged out my only remaining LA Camco drum (6 1/2" deep snare). Hand numbered in marker (pictured below). Purchased from an Australian in London.

I've had three LA kits before, two of them purchased in the 1980s - one in Australia and one in the UK - before there was any collector cache to the drums and when, frankly, they were one of the most obscure brands on the planet. Each of them had at least one drum with some kind of hand numbering in the manner shown in the photo.

Given how cosmopolitan LA is (and was in the 70s too) there being a European working in the factory who did a Euro 7.....not at all unlikely.

I'm Australian born and raised but after almost 20 years in Europe I do them too....not least because (and this is possibly why they did them then) they're in no shape or form able to be mistaken for a 1.

I found a couple more,...

In stead of further hijacking this thread, it would probably make sense to start a new one and ask members for pictures or information on numbers found in LA Camco drums.

Who knows,... me might even unravel the great mystery,... ;)