BGH
Gold Member
I bought this 1966 Ludwig kit last December and posted a few photos at that time. The toms were in good shape, except that some owner added a 2nd muffler to each tom. So each tom has the baseball bat and knob muffler, both on the batter side. Strange, but true.
The kick drum had several issues. Initially, I thought I would send it out to Precision Drum to have these corrected. The more I thought about it, I decided I would attempt the corrections myself. The first issue is that someone also removed the inlay on the hoops, sanded them to natural and coated them with varnish. They did a lousy job and the hoops looked bad.
The more serious issues involved the shell. Ludwig installed the reso side re-ring backwards. That is, the beveled side faced the interior of the drum and the flat side was the bearing edge. I can't imagine that this is how it was supposed to be - it makes no sense. So essentially, there was no bearing edge on the reso side. The seam in that re-ring was just horribly done as well. It had gaps and was misaligned. There were also some cracks and lifting to the interior ply, as well as a few spots that had bubbled up and cracked.
The 3rd pic shows the beveled edge facing inward.
The kick drum had several issues. Initially, I thought I would send it out to Precision Drum to have these corrected. The more I thought about it, I decided I would attempt the corrections myself. The first issue is that someone also removed the inlay on the hoops, sanded them to natural and coated them with varnish. They did a lousy job and the hoops looked bad.
The more serious issues involved the shell. Ludwig installed the reso side re-ring backwards. That is, the beveled side faced the interior of the drum and the flat side was the bearing edge. I can't imagine that this is how it was supposed to be - it makes no sense. So essentially, there was no bearing edge on the reso side. The seam in that re-ring was just horribly done as well. It had gaps and was misaligned. There were also some cracks and lifting to the interior ply, as well as a few spots that had bubbled up and cracked.
The 3rd pic shows the beveled edge facing inward.