First of all, Thanks for the kind words and encouragement, Ed! Welcome

Great looking little snare you got there! This shell should have a really fat, woody sound low, and a ward, tight sound witha big strong crack when cranked a bit. Sounds like it's choking.

Now it sounds like you are on the right track, so let's see if we can cure that choke you got going on. Can you explain, in detail, exactly how you tuned up? What did you set you bottom to, are you tuning to the same tension top and bottom, that sort of thing. Also, let me see a shot of the interior, I like to study these things. I have so many different shells of different composition, and I find the really thin shell to be the fattest, tonally. However, if this drum had no rings to begin with, I think I know what it may look like. Is it similar to the one I did the shell work on recently, were the side was broken?

Now, when I say really thin, I mean like aln=most a single ply looking thing, so thin it could not support itself without rings to begin with. I have several of those, but only one that I like, because it has some MoJo going on it. The WMP I just did is really a cool drum, in that the lauan for it is about 6 mm thick, no rings, not really a ply lay up, if you understand what I mean. I left those edges intact, all I did was lightly knocked the splinters down, and hand cut some beds, it sings nicely. Even with those original heads, and they are the real deal. I think I will switch out some heads to see the potential here. It seems almost every one of my little thin shelled snares had the originals on them, many in pristine condition, others beat to hell, and tossed aside, like yesterday's newspaper. And some rightly so. I am about to start a new project with these funky shells to see if I can make drums out of them afterall. For some of these they are great drums, others may never be, but that is yet to be seen.

Big E, sounds goodCool1 These are great drums for experimenting with I think. Did you re-work the snare beds as well? I find this a must for my MIJ snares.

One trick for getting them to sound better is to use those hard plastic washers (sold by all drum makers Pearl, Tama, etc...) These are more slippery and allow the drum to go up,up,up in tuning slightly smoother than with just metal washers. I also use a thin layer of Vaseline around the edge on the underside of the batter snare head where it will contact the bearing edge- this will allow the drum to slide up to a higher tuning slightly easier. 6 Lug drums need to get CRANKED up tight to sound really good and I think thin heads work best like Remo Diplomats- ideally- Ambassadors are actually ok too, though. I really, really like Pearl brand standard snappys these days- alot. I have tried everything out there and like these crisp, light wires best. The old vintage wires that often come with these drums are quite thick and heavy- not my sound.

Keep it up- look forward to seeing more

O'bop has the lead on this part. I would like you to show the shell. I am thinking the addition of rings to this shell may or may not have been needed/desirable. If this is a 4-7 mm shell, or even more, and it appears there may never have been a need for them. Adding more mass to a the shell may not be what is needed in this case and could be contributing to choking it.

That said, if it is one of the super thin, almost like a single ply that is not much thicker, literally, than the wrap that is/was on it, it certainly will need them, and conversely, if the thicker would be a negative.

And Eric said it, some of these puppies need to be cranked, almost painfully to get in that sweet-spot range. It is almost counter-intuitive to how we tune. Take everything O'bop says and add to it this:

1) Tune the bottom head to about a half to one full turn more than you would normally, then tune the batter to a medium. Once you get to the medium high, you will begin to notice big changes for every 8th turn after that. I don't know how to explain this bottom tension. I use an old Stark tuner to get to the range I want to start from. So this said, I use a range of "SNR" on the bottoms of my wood drums, then go from there up or down. Just by feel, I guess, then the ears kick in, which may not be a good thing in my case....

This is my stack o' snares. This is not all of the complete snares, I think there are two more, a blue spark and WMP missing. The blue spark in this pic is actually Aqua. It was supposed to go to the neighbor kid, but he decided on another one I had. So this one ended up in my stack.

Hi Guys,Thanks for the response. It was a very thin shell. Not even a quarter inch.I'm not much with metric yet.It was an 8 lug originally.I filled in the holes and made it a six lugger because I didn't have any.If you bent on it hard enough you could snap it in half. It still has a lot of ring and overtone so the snare head is tuned lower than the batter. The batter is cranked way up. From a distance it sounds great. Up close you hear a lot of overtone.Maybe I can post a sound file soon.

I don't have many pics of the process. I will post them when I get home from work.

I haven't played with the tuning much yet. Ambassadors top and bottom.

Crappy snares and throwoff.

Cheers,Ed

That Apollo is just simply beautiful.

Big E, it`s ALL cool- that`s the beauty of these drums- mess around and find what works. As you collect them you will find ones that sound better than others- those are the keepers and you`ll obviously need to mess with them less.

I added the pics to the first post.

Cheers,Ed

Wow E, that is pretty darn cool. Never thought to do rings quite like that. That is the same exact shell as my Apollo. I have a guy here at my office that was once an endorser for Pearl. He just went out to look at the Apollo, thought it was pretty sweet for an old MIJ POS. I think he said, "That's pretty good right there, I wouldn't mess with it anymore".

With 40 year old heads.

This is the inside painted.

Nice drums by the way Johnnistix.

Looks like a nice job you did thereClapping Happy2