From: Pico P Ben-Amotz There are so many different ways to go about building drums. The shell (body) of the drum can be carved out of a solid piece of wood, pieced together from staves (long pieces of wood), or adapted from existing objects, such as barrels or tubes. There are other ways to create shells with other materials, such as clay and metals, which I don't have any experience with. If you have never made a drum before, you might want to start out by "re-creating" a shell by modifying a found object. (I did not appreciate the "authenticity" of this approach until I started hanging around a drum builder from West Africa and saw how he made drums out of whatever was around. In Africa, he told me, NOTHING is wasted. People will pick-up up wooden matches off the ground and use them in making some object). One type of object that may be available almost anywhere is cardboard tubing used in construction projects as a form for pouring concrete pillars. No, I'm not talking abour something flimsy like the tube that comes inside a roll of toilet paper. These things are THICK and SOLID. They come in different diameters, suitable for making small drums about the size of bongos (which I've made for my kids) to big barrel sized pieces suitable for making djun-djuns (the large two sided drums that accompany djembe drums and are played with a stick). At least one of the US drums companies-Remo-has started making colorful drums out of this type of material for kids, called Kid Congas I think. If you are interested in making one of these types of drums, start out by trying to find some of these cardboard tubes. If you want more information, you could send e-mail with the subject "Hand Drums Construction-Tubes" to make things more manageable on this list. If you are going to carve a shell out of a solid log, ignore all of the woodworking literature directed towards sculptors about curing (drying) logs to prevent checking (cracks and splits that occur as wood dries). For drum building, you can start we really fresh wet wood, which carves like butter, so long as you don't give it a chance to start drying until you have hollowed out the inside. To be safe, you might want to just start out by hollowing out the inside before working on the outside (but this can make it harder for you when you try to shape the outside to your liking without breaking through the shell). If you take a break, don't give the wood a chance to start drying out: cover it with moist/wet towels. Two other precautions you can take are to leave the bark on the log and seal the ends by rubbing wax into the surface (you can use old candle stubs). The idea behind all of this is that you need to understand that the moisture content of wood adjusts to the moisture level of the air or material surrounding it. With a fresh cut log, the outside begings to dry out first, as moisture passes from the surface to the drier air, and the wood on the outside begins to shrink slightly. Since the wood in the center is not in contact with the drier air, it doesn't loose its moisture and begin shrinking as quickly as the wood on the outside. The result is that the wood on the outside starts to crack as it tries to get smaller than the wood on the inside will allow. By quickly hollowing out inside, you give the wood on the outside room to shrink and exposure both sides of the wall to the air. While you might still get some cracks, which may vary with the thickness of the remaining wood, you might have gotten those cracks on a fully cured piece of lumber (which can be expensive and much harder to carve). If you want more information about carving, send e-mail under the subject "Hand Drums Construction-Logs." This has gotten to long, and the hour has gotten too late. If there is interest, there is plenty more I can say about piecing together shells from staves, adapting hardware from scrap, mounting and tightening skins, and more. Please let me know if you want me to continue. (You can write me directly, pico@pipeline.com, to avoid cluttering up the list). __ /
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