Some years ago I had a dream to built my own custom Snare drum to play with. This dream became true in 2014 when my dad and I were able to make the first instrument. I would like to describe the building process in the following lines.
First of all I had to do some maths to calculate the angle of the staves to get a circle out of it. The second most important step is to pick the wood to use, which of course has some impact of the sound of the drum later on. We picked different local wood like apple, walnut and maple.
In this picture you can see the staves with an angle of 7.5 degrees so that its possible to glue it together into a circle. There you have to be very precise because if you cut too much of the wood or the wrong angle it wont be a perfect circle or with a wrong diameter in the end.
If everything fits, all the 24 staves are glued together in the next step and tightened up with straps so that everything holds together. If everything is dried which can take 1-2 days we prepared for the next difficult step. We had to figure out how to make a round drum out of it.
This was not an easy task but we managed to built a construction to plane the outer and inside of the drum to be a nice and smooth circle. Of course a lot of sanding had to be done by hand, but the rough process worked quite good with this technique.
Besides the actual drum we also had to built the hoops with which the skin of the drum is tightened up to the snare drum later on.
Some holed had to be drilled into the drum to attach the hardware later on. The metal hardware will hold the screws so that you are also able to tune the drum.
We applied a transparent finish to capture the natural look of the wood.
Probably the most enjoyable step is to put it all together. The hardware is attached to the drum and is ready to put a drum skin onto it. Nowadays most of the drumskin is not made out of animal skin, it is some kind of plastic.
It took us about 2 month to put together the finished product, but it was worth it. It is a very special feeling to be able to play on an instrument you built yourself.
In the following video you can take a more detailed look at all the steps:
