This was an interesting snare drum. They made other instruments as well some of them going for BIG bucks.. I know there was a guy doing research for a book about the company.

There are not many examples of these drums and this is the only one I have seen..

David

Cool drum. It's definitely designed for orchestral standup playing with those exposed bearing edges! And that throwoff looks like a blade switch from an old Frankenstein movie! LOL!

The rims are aluminum, I take it (?) Aluminum was really a "space age" metal back then. Up until the time someone figured a way to extract aluminum from ore, it had been considered "exotic". I think it was in the 20's or 30's when they figured it out and literally everything was being made from aluminum after that! I see many drums and instruments from that era incorporating aluminum components.

Bake-a-lite grommet = nice!

Stromberg also made some nice archtop guitars. My friend who collects old guitars says that the "holy grail" of guitars is the Stromberg Master 400 with a cutaway on the lower bout.

Apparently there were some real craftsmen working at Stromberg back in the day.

Thanks for sharing the pictures!

Hey Folks,

I just picked up one of these myself from Cherrie Willoughby at Repercussions. (It's still in the mail so I don't actually have it in my hands yet!) She said she had maybe encountered "maybe 3 or 4" of these drums over the years. This one looks to be the same era and model as the one Mike just bought from Jim Speros, the gentleman who authored the NSMD article about Stromberg about a year ago.

I understand that Jim is preparing to write a book about the Stromberg company. As previously mentioned, the Stromberg name is better known for its banjos and guitars than it's drums. For more background on Stromberg, you can read an article by Jim at http://4stringbanjos.com/StrombergStory.html.

Aside from Mike's I've found two other, and much earlier, Stromberg drums on the web. Both of these appear to have been made while Stromberg was still working for Thompson and Odell. One example is at the National Music Museum in South Dakota, and an even older model is mentioned on the Fielddrums.com blog.

It's so interesting to think that by the 1920s, Stromberg's drums were rivaling those of Leedy, Ludwig, and Slingerland yet by the late 1930s they were gone forever.

-Lee