I would love to know as well.

Hopefully the Dr. might know something about it and can enlighten us.

mlvibes.....my question is how do you keep coming up with these great kits....

The finish is actually marble. They would slice up marble blocks into very thin sheets, then run them through a steam machine, which made the marble more pliable. Once the marble was soft enough, they could wrap it around the outside of the drum shell and then use masonry cement to hold it in place. After that, a coat of clear lacquer was applied to protect the thin marble sheet from cracking.

The one down side to this process is that the marble/cement combination made the drums much heavier than a drum with a conventional wrap.

The up side to these drums was that drummers in the mid to late 60's loved the BIG sound of these drums and started using them in "Hard Rock" bands - Thus, a new genre was born thanks to these marble wrapped beauties!!

Okay... how far did you get before you knew I was full of bull ;)

Ha! big daddy, you're close, but not quite...the drums actually are giant slabs of marble, taken from ancient Greek temples! They're heavy as hell, and a major pain to lug around. Don't sound so hot either! Laughing H

Dang... now that drummer would really be "stoned".Lame

Marbling was a well known effect used in bookbinding for end-papers etc and done I think with watered down ink. My mother now 87 knew how to do it and was taught as part of her teacher training in the 1930s and she showed me examples from her student days. Basically marbled paper would have been laminated or coated with plastic in the early days and then reproduced in some other way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_marbling

Interesting... so you think they made a big marbled sheet of paper, then cut it, wrapped it on the shell and lacquered it on to the drum??

Hmmm... an ancient lost art form. Cool!

Here is my 1941 Marble WFL.

http://drumforum.org/download/file.php?id=24827&mode=view

Love to see it, got denied on viewing the attachment..:(