Myself - I did not want to mess with the bearing edges on my 58 Gretsch kit. A friend that has been building & working with drums for decades offered to look at them and ultimately worked on them. To use his words - he kept to the original intentions on all the edges and he said it was the most difficult edge job he had ever done. Each one of my drums (all four) had a different type of bearing edge. And he had to work around the seam "bump" on the wrapped finish - not easy to do appearantly.

My answer - even though I have absolutely no experiance in working with edges - would be not to do anything to them unless you know you are not going to change the "original intentions" of those edges. If that is important to you of course. If it isn't and you need to sand them a little to make the head seat better then you have to make that call.

It`s not an endgrain, stains wont go deep,..wrap the sandpaper 220,..400 if you`re scared,..around a small DRY kitchen sponge and have at it. Keep in mind, hardwood will render 400 grit to 900 grit real fast and you may end up scornning the wood to a shine !!

Well, keeping the bearing edges intact is very important to me but I don't have anyone local that could do the job professionally. I'll just try it on my own and be extra careful. 400 grit shouldn't remove much wood and like oddball said the stains can't be very deep. Thanks for the advice guys :-)

Cuttle