The 12 inch is from a club date kit and the 20x14 looks to be a late 50's bass drum. You can find all this in the vintage drum guide. Check it out.

I like the second bass and tom. They are sweet old shells. They will sound great. Hard to beat the sound of aged AM. I also love the hardware on it. Nickel will clean up nicely. Cool old drums.

12 x 20s and 12 x 22s are not that uncommon for late '50s WFLs and transition era WFL / Ludwigs. They're great sounding drums...I love the mahogany interior shells. If one of your shells was originally a lacquer, be careful if and when you rewrap as some of those shells were "oversized" and if wrapped may be hard to get heads on.

BTW, double sets of straight spurs are also pretty common for those era bass drums.

What shell would you keep? The second one is probably a better choice.. But the first one got a slightly different position of the spurs and rail consolette that works better..

As you can see there's some rust on some parts, like the rail consolette.. Are there anyway to make this thing look descent again?

Keep both, I would make a bouble bass kit out of them.

I bump my own thread for some advice..

when comparing the two the second one with mahogny interior have really nice bearing edges, as good as new, so I'll keep that one. I don't like the spurs though.. I'm thinking about putting old 70-style curved spurs on it, where the holes for the old spurs are.. would this work? should I go for the big or small ones? the bracket for the bigger ones would definitly cover the holes where the old spurs were.. but the smaller one's would be more... "correct".. bigger one's are easier to come by though..

Since the original black laquer is falling away on the bassdrum and has some nasty scratches on the tom tom I'm thinking about stripping them down instead of doing a re-wrap or something like that. have anyone done this? don't think Ive seen any natural 60's ludwigs..

[COLOR="DarkRed"]Good choice on the second one, it looks like a cooler shell. Hopefully you can bring some or most of the hardware back...it won't be easy and hopefully once the rust is gone and chrome is shined there won't be too much pitting left. Can you get Dawn dish soap where you are ? It is good at removing rust without damaging the plating....you just soak the pieces in it for 2-3 days, then rinse and brush with a soft toothbrush.

I would also keep the first shell...use it for another project some day. I love 12" deep bass shells...or even 10" for that matter....they sound great and are so dang portable.

I do NOT believe that the curved-spur mounts will go in the same locations as the telescoping ones. So...your choice would be to either just add whatever spuurs you want wherever they comfortably go (determine the positing by how much adjustment you can achieve on the legs...and also by locating them so the drum won't rock forward or back when hit with the pedal). Then just cover the old holes with the new wrap.If you are gonna relacquer them, then that becomes an issue with the existing holes and you may have to patch the holes.

You can try to remove the paint and refinish the wood. Sometimes it'll work out...and sometimes the paint will have soaked into the grain so much that no matter how hard you try....the naked wood will still have some remnants of paint in there.....so....it's a judgment call...[/COLOR]

I guess an anchor would prevent it from rocking forward.. but the bass drum tips over when I position the tom on the rail consolette. What were they thinking when they positioned those? Anyways. Never heard of that soap, I don't think I can get it here. I used rust remover and autosol polish and the hardware looks pretty good.. I'll post pics in a few days. Im actually using all of the hardware, although some claws are in really bad shape.