[COLOR="DarkRed"]Unfortunately, eBay is the best place to find vintage Premier replacement lugs...those are hard to come by. I dunno where you are exactly but I would guess that UK would have more of these than US (?)

Good move on unloading the Acousticon....eesh, those shells are a blemish on the history of drummaking....

For the elongated holes, all I can suggest is grinding them into round (use a Dremel tool with a conical grinding stone or such) and then insert a small washer, probably plastic, to center the hole again. It may take some digging to find a washer that would fit, but they would be at hardware stores, I'd imagine.

A pic would be nice.....[/COLOR]

Yes, with patience you can definitely find those lugs on eBay. But you should investigate vintage drum shops in Europe, too.

to get to the lug-bolts you have to remove the inner shell, which is 'sprung' into place, not glued. Be warned - if you do remove the inner shell, make sure you have plenty of patience, they take time to get back in again!

Well... thing is I'm in Hungary... which isn't making things any easier...

I seem to have found an old busted Premier shellset that would be a good source for these lugs though the price is a tad high I think, since it's pretty busted. It's a 20" 16" 12" set, the 12" has everything and is near perfect (it has the same lugs as I'd need), the 16" floor tom is missing all lugs and rim on the bottom, the kickdrum seems to have a non-premier tom-holder retrofitted to it, the shell itself seems to have some minor water-damage on the bottom, and is missing the front rim along with the screws.

Price is round 177 USD.

Pic: http://www.ritmusdepo.hu/image/apro/76141.jpg

What do you guys think? Could this set be saved with little effort?

(If so, I'd buy it, strip the 12" for the lugs, pop on lugs from a 5" deep Premier snare I have which look only slightly different, and restore the full set.)

bigz:

I bought it with the inner shell already removed, as it had all the lugs taken off, and I fiddled with it for a while to put it back, which did work; although I think the inner shell is warped since I can't for the life of me get it to fit without a single gap between the plies of the reinforcement rings and the inner shell. What's more, the edges that are supposed to meet are slightly worn... perhaps from others' efforts to put it back in place. I can put the inner shell back in nice and snug, but after the first few rim-shots it slips out. What I did, as I've assembled it with a temporary set of lugs that work but don't look the same, is that I used thin, small strips of double sided tape to hold it in place. Until I can get the original lugs this seems the simplest.

I just love the sound of this thing. Have Evans Genera HD Dry batter, and Evans Hazy 300 resonant heads on it with a really tight tuning, which gives almost a marching snare -like sound, with quiet, well fitting 'wooden' sounding transients.

I'll try and put up some pics soon. Any ideas on the snare wires? Still can't seem to find much info on the dampers that came with this thing, and I don't really feel like drilling holes into snares... the screw heads wouldn't be flush anyway and would just damage the reso head.