rcanzlovar.com

Articles Recipes Blog Events Information Wordpress Projects Feeds Now

Drum building progress, part 4

I haven’t written about this in a little while, and there are some newcomers to the show (Hi Scott!) and so here’s the story so far. My friend Max from Rhythmetrix has these drums. They are large drums set on stands played with big sticks. He calls them “taiko” drums and we can debate that all night if we want, but that’s what he calls them. They are made from oak whiskey barrels and have bull hide heads.

This is what one of Max’s drums looks like:

He brings them around to programs that he does - corporate bonding, mindfulness drumming, and some other interesting settings. I’ve had the pleasure to attend a coule of his more interesting outings in Boulder and at a campout on BLM land near Leadville at various times in the last year or so. At one of them, someone asked if he sells them, and he said yes, but they aren’t cheap. I didn’t know what he sells them for, and I still don’t, but I like a good challenge, so I started looking around for barrels that i could use for building such things.

Previous entries in this series showed my efforts at transforming barrels into drum bodies

I’ve been kind of inactive on that project for a while, thinking about how it’s all going to go.

I have so far produced two drum bodies that are a bit smaller than Max’s drums because I took them apart and glued the slats together edge to edge, not cormer to corner as they appeared in the barrlels I acquired. Think of it this way: the cross section of a barrel stave is a trapezoid. For those who forgot geometry, a trapezoid is like a rectangle except that instead lf having the long sides be the same length, one is shorter than the other. Think truncated pyramid if that helps.

When I started gluing the pieces together, i took the full surface of the slanty parts and put them face to face because that made some sense to me. When I was done, I ended up wiht a circle and still had some pieces left over.You can see these results in the other posts on this blog here and here. This post hadn’t been published and showed how I worked myself into corner with the first couple barrels by not labeling them before I took them apart, and the method going forward. Now that I have the heads, I’ll get this going again.

It seems that a barrel has the trapezoids only touching at the angles of the longer of the two parallel sides. In Max’s drums, he filled this v shape with in some kind of proprietary process that kept the barrel intact before cutting them down with some kind of giant saw to make three per barrel.

A drum like this has 4 major components: a body, a head made from some kind of animali: goat, cow, elk, yak… you get the idea. The skins are not tanned, but rather are used as rawhide. The hair must be removed, as well as any lingering fat. I’ve learned in this process that fat is one of the things that separates the skin from muscles. Ask me why I know, I dare you. There are also metal rings and some rope. The rings are the next sub-project desrving of their own post, and trust me, there will be.

I’m a product of the suburbs, and I’m definitely more a city mouse than a country mouse. I know my way around tools, however, because both of my grandfathers were makers of some sort - one was a tool and die maker in Bay City, Michigan and the other was a tinkerer in New York City who held a couple of patents. Until recently, if you entered my last name into the google patents search engine, you would find Grampa’s drawings of some innovations in the world of model railroading. He had a patent for making steam locomotive electric trains make the “chug, chug chug” sound coordinated with the speed of the train. Nowadays this is done with little speakers, but Grampa did it with a little box with tiny bits of gravel attached somehow to the wheels. But I digress.

Anyway, being a city boy as I am, I ended up working last year at a local ranch and feed store called Murdoch’s which is about 300 yards from my house (yes, i counted the steps). I worked in the tool department and often helped people find chainsaws, leaf blowers and pointing them to the other parts of the store to buy feed for sheep, goats, horses, dogs, cats, cows, squirrels, etc. Oh and we had a section of ways to kill mice, rats and squirrels (poor squirrels!) It’s also a good place to get various kinds of hardware and supplies for tractors and such.

There were other people in the store who had various specialties, including a nice lady named Carol who could help you find the right vaccinations for your livestock. Carol knows a lot of stuff and the store would suffer a lot if she decided to retire.

I’d been curious where i was going to get some skins for my drums. I did buy a couple of goat skins which are ready to go. I found out that you can buy a raw hide cow skin for almost $500 from the same place. It seemed like maybe i could do the deed myself, so I started looking into where to get some cow skins that haven’t been processed. I contacted a couple of businesses that handle butchering. One specialized in handling your game (deer, elk, etc) and they wouldn’t help me. I called another place that did cow butchering, but they said that the skins were the property of the owner of the animal and if they didn’t want them, they were destroyed and they couldn’t help me. I started to ask if they could point me to someone who could help but before I could finish the sentence they hung up on me.

For a little bit i thought maybe i might get an elk hide, but none of the people I knew who did that contacted me, so that didn’t happen. I assumed that cattle are usually slaughtered in the fall/winter. One day I called Carol at the store and she gave me a couple of phone numbers to follow up on. I called one of them, a guy named Don. We had a nice conversation and he said that he didn’t have anything currently but that he might in a few weeks.

Last weekend, Don called me at 0830 on a Saturday morning after I’d been dancing to techno in a basement. I didn’t take the call, but he called me again Sunday morning. He turned me onto Scott, for whom he had just butchered two cows. “The hides are sitting right there on the ground”, he said. I called Scott that afternoon, and made arrangements to come and look at them Monday night. I drove up to Scott’s farm after work on Monday and bought two cow hides for $300. He also had a pig hide there that he was willing to throw in for free, but I figured I already have my hands full with these.

I brought them home in a couple of contractor bags. The pictures are at the bottom. I promised on Facebook that I’d make it a choice to look at them because they’re kind of bloody. If you scroll to the bottom, they’re there, and I’m gonna try to leave some vertical space so that as much as possible, it’s your choice to look at them.

I told Max what I had gotten, and he was very interested in seeing the pics. His response was “Jesus, don’t they wipe off the blood?” I had to agree, they were kind of gross looking as they were.

Around this time, my friend Warren shared this video with me about using a pressure washer to remove the fat and stuff from a deer hide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCc1ugqKuiw

Considering the traditional alternative involved scraping it inch by inch, I decided this was worth a try.

In a 2025 twist, I’ve been using Gemini as my advisor in this endeavor. At work on Tuesday, someone pointed out that i really needed to salt the hides. After using the car wash to clean off the blood, I decided check into salting. Gemini told me that if it was going to take a few days I could “dry salt” it. It was late at night, so I went over to Wal Mart looking for salt. I didn’t find it, but I did find snow melt. Same thing, right?

No. 

When I told Gemini what I had done, it said i needed to remove the magnesium and calcium cloride “immediately” because it’s not the same as sodium cloride. So I did that, and the next morning I went to Murdoch’s and got a big bag of “agricultural salt”. The difference beween the two kinds of salt, Gemini explained, was that magnesium cloride creates an exothermic reaction and that it would burn my hide. This explains to me why when I see snow melt, there is a little circle of melt around each grain.

Back to the hide: I laid the hides out on my parking spot and laid down a layer of salt all over them. I work a 9-5 office job, so I couldn’t really get to it right away. On Friday, I rented a pressure washer and went to town on the hide. Since the video called for 2500 PSI, i got the smaller one which went up to 2700 PSI and went pretty much full out during the process.

Once I was finished, I humg the hides to let the excess water drain out. The hair holds a lot of weight.

Next to use lime to remove the hair.

After some consideration I decided that rather than buying a new trash can for this purpose, I would use the recycle bin.

At first I thought to plug the hole in in the bottom for drainage, but Gemini said that the bubble gum and adhesive would break down under the water pressure and the corrosive effect on the adhesive. Not before I did this. Decided to leave it while I am doing the liming.

I didn’t take any pics of this part of the process, I used tripled up 55 gallon barrels, 25 gallons of water and 10 cups of lime.

Below here there is blood. You have been warned.