Where do I begin?!! With all due respect to Ludwig, they need to spend just a bit more time with bearing edges on the Legacy and Classic Maple kits. These are high-end, custom ordered drums. Wood working, especially in the drum world, is at a point where there's no excuse for anything less than perfect! Upon receiving my drums, and marveling at how beautiful they looked, I then pulled all the heads and brought all the shells to Chris Heuer for inspection. Chris owns Heuer's Drum Lab in Burbank http://heuersdrumlab.com and has a milled granite table for cutting edges and checking the level of edges. Chris could only laugh and shake his head with both toms and snare drum. He's seen this time and time again and just can't believe that these drum companies can't get level edges! Ludwig wanted me to send the entire kit back, but I refused, saying that I didn't feel comfortable with the work performed by Ludwig's "craftsmen". I struck a deal with Ludwig and had Chris do the work. To look at the edges, you'd never know they are not factory original... except they are now perfectly level! Chris felt that the bass drum edges were close enough, considering that I would be using muffler straps on both heads.
As to the snare drum, the beds where so WIDE and DEEP that the drum sounded bad! The shell was actually deep enough that after Chris finished with the bottom end, the depth was still at 5". My "Jazz Festival clone" is now better than what comes from Ludwig. Sorry Ludwig, but I have to be honest!
It took quite some time to get all the details completed, but this is now a near perfect kit... which is how it should have been done in the first place by Ludwig. I still love Ludwig drums, but like any other large company, profit seems to come before the little bit of extra labor time it would take to make them right the first time.
My apologies for going on so much about this, but I'm passionate about drums and drum building!
