Colors
Waxes
Wraps
Lacquers
Canopy

Visualize It

Use the links above to navigate to your choice of finish!

Finishes

We offer 4 classes of finishes in tons of Colors. Waxes, Wraps, "Lacquers," and Canopy. Hardware options vary too which change the overall appearance of your kit, but more on that in the details link. There’s really a lot that goes into your finishes. First is the color. Each type of material we use, (dyes, inks, stains, paints, natural pigments, etc) affect how the wood looks. The finish that follows makes a huge difference to the outcome as well.

Colors

Colors are fun! We have lots of ways to color your drums. Primarily, we use hand-mixed aniline wood dyes directly on the prepared wood shells. This material is very colorfast and made to order. We mix your colors by hand, offering you options/samples as we go, then keep your "recipe" on file so we can reproduce the same color later. Paints and stains thinned, oversanded, and multi-layered make up lots of cool options. We even boil berries, steep teas, and percolate ground up nut shells for something different.

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Waxes

We’ve developed a series of wax and oil + wax applications that finish nicely. You can end up with a matte, satin, or even semi-gloss finish over your color. Maintenance? A bit of buffing once a year does wonders. What’s cool about these finishes is that if you really gouge your drum, we can repair the finish to a like-new appearance (but with the physical scratch or trough you created still present). This can be done quickly, easily, and cheaply. "Lacquers" are nasty about refinishing—more on that later.

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Wraps

Here you find all the typical wraps such as white marine pearl, blue onyx, red sparkle, etc. A few crazy ones, but nothing too far out of the ordinary. These are great for a classic look with rugged durability. Maintenance? Pledge or Endust. If you really gouge them, we’ve got problems...Y’see, we don’t just tack down a strip of double stick tape at the seam and call it good. The entire drum and entire wrap surfaces are coated with a no-nonsense contact cement (that doesn’t shrink). There’s no safe and complete removal techniques we know of—rewrapping just isn’t an option.

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(Lacquers)

Parentheses here because almost no one uses real lacquer anymore (though we can!) What folks really mean here is a variety of high-gloss polyurethane clearcoats which are like you see everywhere. Great depth of wood grain in the end result! Maintenance? Pledge or Endust. Occasional rebuffing a nice idea—we’d do it for a fee. Nice looking stuff, but scratch magnets. Y’ever been blown away by how much auto body repairs are for little dings and scratches? Same here. To repair a slice through the lacquer is very involved and expensive. Basically, you have to remove (sand off) lots of the material around the boo-boo, repaint/restain, then blend in new finish.

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Canopy

This is the truly custom stuff. We’ve done some of these ourselves, and we outsource work too. We’re talking airbrushed artwork, chisel-lined stains that don’t bleed into each other, decoupage pictures, sparkle-imbedded "lacquers," new UV-reactive clearcoating that sparkles like crazy, and the list goes on—what can you imagine?

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