I just phoned them and ordered a 18" medium. I'll try it on my Gretsch snare. I've found that I need about 1 1/4" per side to tuck the head, so for a 14" drum I'd need 14 + 1 1/4 + 1 1/4 = 16 1/2, and the closed next size is an 18".

I talked to Matt, the owner of the company. He said I was the first person he'd talked to using them for drumset. Matt comes off as a good guy, I had a very nice conversation with him and he seems passionate about his work, and I like people like that.

These heads are from Pakistan and I anticipate similar quality to the ones from Columbia I use on my floor toms. The same quality others say is no good, but my ears tell me is good. I am at the point where plastic is over - funny but to me plastic seems really old now!

The head, with shipping was a bit under $18.41. Considering my calf kick head is from the 1940's the thing about calf costing more than plastic sure isn't true.

It should be here next week, along with a slunk calf for the bottom of the snare I found on eBay for $20. I put an Earthtone on the drum now with a Remo snare bottom and it sounds like crap - Earthtone goat heads don't cut it for me and a skin top with plastic bottom is horrible to my ears - BOING!

There are still no sources of cheap slunk (what'd you call me?) that I know of.

Learned a couple of things from talking to Matt:

He's used deer and it stretches and stretches forever and won't use it anymore.

He used to buy whole skins from Jeff Stern and says that they were top quality. Matt does hand drums like djembes. He said that the spine of the skin (where it went over the backbones) is the strongest and stretches the least. The belly stretches a lot compared. Ideally he likes the spine to run down the center of a drum.

He said that he's got goat from the USA and abroad. He said he thought that the domestic goats were pampered and the skins were soft like a chamois, and that the imported goats, who had probably led a harsher life, made better drum heads. I said "like some surfer chick's skin who's been in the sun everyday for 20 years?" and he said yes, like that!

For whatever reason, the center of the universe for calf heads seems to be, of all places, Ireland. Seems like they took tanning leather to another level.

It's called learn as you go folks.

Here's a note about the cheapo calf heads I put on my two floor toms: for whatever reason, these heads seem to vary more with the humidity than others. I'm wondering if they are belly skin - they look like they could be. The heads on my China tom hardly vary in the humidity. The floor toms vary quite a bit. My 26" Slingerland calf kick hardly varies. Maybe this is a negative about the cheap skins.

People find it weird that I'm a vegetarian. I won't eat meat. No... I see it as emergency food. You and I are emergency food - let's hope t doesn't come to that! But using skins of animals that are already dead and that are killed for other reasons... I take the old view that we shouldn't waste anything and I have no problem with it.

You are gonna share with us, right? I mean, I want to know if I should keep these sorts of things to myself if it turns out to suck....LoLoLoLo

It should be here by the end of the week, and I have a wood flesh hoop already, so it should be on the RB snare next week.

I suspect similar results to what I got from Columbia for my floor toms.

Probably the best car I ever bought was a '69 Impala I got for $80 from a homeless guy who was living in it - drove it for years. Worst car I ever bought was a brand new Toyota - sold it in a few months and lost thousands. Because of stuff like that I'm not of the "it's so cheap it can't be good" thinking when it comes to these calf heads, more the opposite.

I got the head from drumfactorydirect.com the other day.

If you look at the first pic, the area I've circled caught my eye as being thin and paper-like when I first inspected the head.

The head needed to be trimmed a small amount, and when I did that I tried to use the area away from the thin area, but when I was tucking the head it tore a big puka (that's Hawaiian for "hole") in the thin area as seen in the 2nd pic.

I contacted Matt at drumfactorydirect.com and he said it was probably a bad head, that they were drop shipped, and that now he has bulk 20-30 heads so he can go through them.

I don't feel like sending it back or dealing with it, I'll keep it and there's enough useable head for a 10" drum sometime.

However, the floor tom cheapo calf heads I got here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Two-New-18-Dia-Natural-Calf-Skin-Heads-1st-Quality_W0QQitemZ250452599566QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a5023630e#ht_2991wt_909

are good and I would buy them again.

I just got an email from the owner, Matt. He said he'll have a bunch of heads in 2 weeks and we will talk then.

Of course I was bummed about the head puka. But I have not given up on this, and get a good feeling from Matt. If he can go through the heads and eliminate the flawed ones it would be worth trying again, hopefully with some price mod for the one I bought although the price of the head was dirt cheap and it will work for a 10" or 11" on my Hawaiian GigPig, which I would like to make.

Other than the problem area, the head looked useable and it wasn't too thick like I'd feared since they are mainly a hand drum supplier.