"Drawn brass lugs cut weight, will never crack or break." DOH!

"Never" is a mighty long time. I wonder to what degree they tried to test that or was it just an assumption they made?

Dan! What a cool Rogers ad! Yeah, a big "oops" about not cracking or breaking! I wonder how long it took for cracking issues to get back to the factory? In today's saying, it might be "oops, our bad!"

-Mark

I played my Rogers Holiday set that I bought new in 1961 for about five years. I don't recall ever seeing any evidence of cracks in the lugs.

Like anything else it probably was impacted by how careful one was in applying tension, but there can be no question at this juncture that it was a problem. It is very rare to find a set without cracked lugs and Rogers wouldn't have gone to the significant expense of replacing them if it wasn't evident to them too.

Well, it looked good on paper!

Light, low mass casings was obviously a great idea and ahead of it's time. I just don't know why they weren't tested. It wouldn't have been hard to tensile test the lug to determine it's strength.

Rogers was well aware of the cracked lug issue. The issue usually seemed to arise from over tensioned drums, with the most common problem drum being the 6 lug Spotlight, that evolved into the Luxor. (Obviously less lugs meant more tension on the lugs.)

During the end of the B&B lug era, they came up with a fix. They began using a cast B&B lug that did not crack on B&B lug Luxors. I have only seen this lug on early Luxors. Kind of wish they would have used these lugs on more drums, but they opted to move to the beavertail lug. They are identifiable by the flange on the bass of the lug. They also had bosses that went thru the shell, instead of the problematic tabs. No cracking issues with this lug.

Here is an example...

Nice piece of history there PowerTone. It always amazes me that I keep learning little details about Rogers drums. Rather remarkable that they did not carry on with that lug. It is quite nice. The fact of having the bosses pretty much solves it all.

Even the Way and later Camco drums suffer from not having had that element incorporated into their lugs. They tend to creep and push the wrap over time. Does anyone know if DW drums have a boss on the lugs now?