Beverley Script Badge Drums

Every so often we buy what looks like a hunk of junk and try to turn it into a playable kit -- or even a nice kit. A few months ago (autumn 2015) I bought a Frankenstein kit consisting of two "script badge" era Beverley drums (pre-international birch with earlier lugs, 12x8, 16x16) and one later Blue Badge era (mahogany, later lugs, 20x14).

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to see the end result now, scroll to the bottom and then come back up here. Main idea: These old Beverley pre-international drums are fantastic.

Also, before I get started, I want to correct some misinformation that's out there on the net: Beverley made Pre-International sizes. Don't let anyone tell you they didn't. They did.

So back to FRANKENSTEIN, as I call him/her/it/them. Here's what the drums looked like...

Notice the following major detractors:

• Horrible sticky-foil "wrap"
• Later B&H era Beverley badges
• Extra holes in kick (typical of Premier and Beverley that originally had disappearing spurs, particularly when on a mahogany shell)

But also a few items that gave me hope:

• Lugs seemed to be in nice shape
• Chrome generally looking tolerable
• Original slotted rods and kick rods
• No extra holes in toms 
• Original "tall boy" hoops in decent condition

When I took possession, I quickly peeled back the horrible foil "wrap" to find shells in OK condition, but covered -- COVERED -- in nasty glue.

To make a very long story short, this crap did NOT want to come off easily. I had to use gel-type paint remover to get it off, but the shells remained stained.

The birch drums fared a bit better:

But the mahogany had quite a bit of glue stuck in its deeper grain:

Some outer ply came off on the floor tom. Notice the dark middle ply. MAHOGANY. Pretty obvious that this is a birch-mahogany-birch drum. That made me pretty happy. I ended up filling the "holes" pretty easily with wood paste. I've read that wood paste can crack on drums. Hopefully it will hold up. I'll report back if it doesn't.

Once I finally got the drums cleaned and sanded, I had to decide how to finish them. Since the drums are mixed (birch toms, mahogany kick) I couldn't really oil them (no natural finish). The most obvious thing to do would have been re-wrap. But as you probably know, decent wrap is expensive. I promised myself not to spend too much on this job, so I ruled out wrap.

Instead I opted to use natural SHELLAC mixed with BRONZE POWDER. You see, I had some materials leftover from my recent clean-up of my Golden Sun Premier B303, so I thought I would use them on Frankenstein.

The process is pretty simple: You simply dissolve the bronze powder in the shellac and start brushing it on. You have to make sure the powder is evenly dissolved, and you have to use a quality brush: The finish is only as good as your brush.

This is an intermediate stage. Notice it's still pretty ugly.

I applied many layers - probably about six. I did not sand between layers since I found that too much material came off during sanding, even with 600 grain.

The final stage was to spray with Talens Acrylic Varnish (Glossy 114). This gave the drums a touch of shine and smoothed over a few of the imperfections. Overall I ended up with a pleasant finish. We'll see how it holds up. The other day a bandmate hit the kick with a mic stand and the drum came out unscathed. So far so good.

Here are some shots iof the finished kit. Pardon the mismatched kick hoops. I used what I had around.

And here's an original badge as well as some that I printed with a 3D printer. They look alright, but aren't quite up to my standards. The main problem is finding a way to fix them to the drum. I need to make some time to visit a screw and nail shop. I'm sure there's a solution.