Interlude #2: Gasket Night.

Who would let the chunky metal lugs scratch the beautiful high gloss poly? Not me. And who wants that signaturish/finished look that some rubber gaskets will give you? We all do, don't we?

So I went looking for suitable rubber sheet to make gaskets. After trying to source free EPDM leftovers from a construction site - without success - I went to a store selling industrial rubber products. They carry all kinds of rubber products for many applications and sell it by 10 cm (4"). So I got this strip of 1mm thick neoprene rubber (20 cm x 120 cm) for a couple of euros.

Time to make a pile of gaskets. Sixty-eight. Forty-eight for this 3-piece. Plus twenty for some snare drum on the way. Mmh, late evening chain work. Here's how I worked:

1. Measuring and drawing the lug adding 1 mm offset.

Dimensions of a champion/phonic lug in millimeters, measured on a digital caliper. You're welcome

2. Printing lugs on label paper, then sticking on rubbersheet and cutting.

3 Making a punching template with cardboard, and fixing the gasket at the back with repositionable spray glue. Then punch the holes using my office hole punch.

4 Little detail: round off the corners using a file to get that "factory made" look.

I also cut 5 gaskets for the floor tom and bass drum feet brackets - which are identical on a champion. And 3 for the badges. But still a long way before mounting them. Oh well...

Interlude #1: Badge design whim

When I bought the drums, the shells were actually wrapped in some sort of cheap white plastic and of course, there weren't any badges.

Drums without badges don't feel right to me. How about designing my own SONOR badge? It might sound absurd in terms of restoration, but I think it's something fun to do.

First of all, I didn't want the badge to have the late teardrop / champion-era old mallet logo, I just don't like it. It looks like they didn't know what to do between the original teardrop / the new beat logo (handwritten style, re-popularized with the vintage series) and the current style so they wrote SONOR in plain sans serif capitals next to two mallets. That's why I redesigned a badge that would be plausible for a mid-70s drumkit, some sort of a transitional model between the original champion and the later phonic centennial.

Anyway, I didn't completely start from scratch since I also took some inspiration from an existing snare badge from that era, that features the then new Sonor logo with small mallets, and that is fitted on a shell with small mallets lugs with inserts. Just like my champion.

So here's the badge I designed, matching the size of the champion's and the existing mounting holes:

I first redrawed the SONOR logo on a vector software called inkscape. They used the same design until 1995, even though the small mallet version was replaced around 1980 by the big mallet version (see a late phonic badge for example).

I like the "Full Vibrating Sound Shell" label, it sounds a little silly, especially since we've seen more "vibrating", thinner shells around, but then again, I'm just having fun and trying to do my best to respect the spirit of SONOR.

The text font is very standard: Helvetica (here condensed), that's the font SONOR used the most. They used it on the centennial badge below and on many other designs.

The badges were cut from 0.5 mil brass sheet, I like how brass and dark green stain match. "British" style on German engineering.

After trying several methods to transfer my design onto brass, I finally printed the badge design on waterslide decal paper. That's actually the easiest way to do it, and the texture and sheen of the brass is not affected by the thin decal film.

 

 When it's dry, I'll spray a couple of coats of clear varnish to protect it.