Nothing beats the ease of a wipe-on finish. So take your time and think things through, consult any and all available resources, stay flex-ible with your expectations, and before you know it you’ll be rocking out on your very own homespun diy drum set built to your specs with your own two hands. One final note: There are countless ways to screw this thing up, both big and small.įailing to double-check a single misplaced lug mark is enough to tank a whole shell (unless you’re going for the Swiss-cheese look). But just know that it’s not going to come together in a weekend. It’s also difficult to put a hard figure on the research, planning, setup, mistake correction, etc., that are built into this kind of undertaking.

The rest of the finishing materials and tools were purchased separately.Īs for less tangible costs, if I were billing for time on this project, I’d estimate about 20 hours, although in reality I completed it over the course of weeks in bite-size chunks of time snatched away from a busy schedule – the way any hobbyist most likely would. The hardware came from Drum Factory Direct, a one-stop-shop for pretty much any drum components you can imagine. The Keller shells received a curly-maple veneer expertly done by Eric Sooy, owner of Drum Foundry and Black Swamp Percussion. The main snare is a solid-ply walnut shell from Vaughncraft, a company long known for outstanding solid-shell drums. The maple shells that make up the main body of the kit are from Keller – a relatively new formulation called Magnum that features the same high-grade maple and assembly technology as Keller’s VSS shells, but with plies that are about 40 percent thicker. The kit I’ve built consists of components graciously donated by the companies involved to showcase what’s possible, but you can build this exact kit for the cost breakdown included on page 64.

There obviously isn’t enough room in one article to get extraordinarily deep into the specifics of each part of the process – there are many excellent resources for that, a list of which I supply at the end of this article – but this should give you a good indication of what’s involved, with visual references for each step of the process.Īlso, the steps outlined here are foundational, so you’ll be able to use the concepts and techniques to build many different types of kits. This is a practical tutorial on how to build an understated yet elegant 5-piece diy drum set that requires minimal tooling and materials and no particularly esoteric equipment, skills, or fancy shop space – I completed the entire project, start to finish, on the balcony and in the living room of my apartment using a fair amount of homemade jigs and setups to make up for any lack of specialty tools.

How to make a bass drum