Serial Number 019-001
First Snare Drum
Started on November 25, 2023: completed on December 24, 2023
This snare drum project actually came about from the first time I met Dave Ketchum. It was at a Pretty Ugly show at Branch 5 and Steve Clark introduced us. Dave said to me, “Let me know when you start building snare drums.” It stuck with me all the time and at this point, it would be good to change things up and have a different kind of project to work on.
From doing some research, there are (at least) two ways to build a snare drum -laminating and staves. I would prefer to do the laminating method but it sounds like there will be some special tools to do the job as well as specific cuts of wood to stitch cross grained.
Building it with staves seems to be the easier method. A couple of special jigs to route the outside and then the inside is needed – which means a great deal of precision will be needed. I will be trying it with this method but who knows, I may try to laminate in the future.
I expect to build a few of these as I expect the first few to be ….not so good.
Initially, I was thinking of doing it with Purple Heart. I watched a video of a snare drum made with Purple Heart. I was thinking that I could heat up the Purple Heart to give it a nice unique colouring to it like I did with guitar S/N 004. I did some more research and found that Bubinga was popular to use for snare drums. I will be building this snare drum with Bubinga instead of Purple Heart.
Maple would probably be the ideal wood to do the first few snare drums with. I believe the cost of Maple isn’t very high and Maple is easy to work with – in the bending sense which I won’t be doing any of.
After looking at many jigs for routing, I saw one that routed both the outside and inside of the drum with just the one jig. Of course, with this being the first run, it would need some modifications for the future.
It took a while to find some hardware. I was lucky to have most of the hardware donated which left me to just buy the two rings.
Chris helped me put setup the snare and tension the skins. Thanks Chris
SPECS
Body Bubinga
Diameter 14″
Depth 5″
Hoops generic no name
Lug Casings
Tension Rods
Snare Strainer
Snare Dixon 20 strand snare wires
Batter Head Evans G1 coated drum head
Snare Head Evans snare side head