i wonder if having the rail-consolette cause the acrylic shells to crack easier?

maybe that's why Bonham always brought two bass drums on tour..

Hmmmm

I don't know...this one has no cracks at all.

This is an early, very early 70s Star stencil. TAMA did not produce stencil kits once they shifted production from Star to TAMA, unless it was under the Hoshino brand. I am getting closer to being able to make public my findings on the whole Star/TAMA/Hoshino connection into the 70s when Star was dropped, TAMA introduced and Hoshino used as the stencil arm for only a very short period of time. The Hoshino stuff was very sub-par, which was why the big distributors went to Pearl. TAMA made it very clear they would only use the Hoshino name for a short period and that the gear would not rise to the level of the old stuff. It was a stop-gap measure only to keep some cash flow. Once TAMA made it's name, they never looked back.

The problem I am having is that no one at TAMA wants to sign off on the truth because the Hoshino branded stuff sucked so bad, they don't want their name associated with it, now or then.

This is a nice example, and only a handful of the stencil distributors were allowed to purchase the acrylic shells. St. Louis Music (Stewart, Apollo, etc) only sold a very few. Star badged kits are much more prevalent.