What I do is put some all purpose craft-type glue on the head and hoop and use small clamps to hold the hide in place as I go. I know.....it's ugly....but so far it's worked for me.

Both these drums were done with the 'glue on method' and they sound fine. I would not have been able to use the hides otherwise.

Hi Gary,

Thanks for sharing. Now, that's interesting. Glue to replace the natural glue, kind of makes sense. So you play these drums and heads that you have glued in this way?

My re-tucked head had at least enough natural glue left in it to enable me to tuck it, although - as I point out in my original post - I had to make some not so neat tucks to make it stick to the flesh-hoops.

Considering the price of new calf skin heads, I find vintage heads an interesting option.

Best,

Magnus

Magnus

When a head is tucked once and it stretches off the the hoop it means it was mounted improper.And by tuning it uneven it causes to come off the hoop. The putting of glue also a disadvantage because when skin is wet the glue looses it's texture with the water and does not stick to skin nor hoop proper.

The best thing to do when this happens is buy a new skin Used skins have most of the time lost it texture and will slip off hoops due to dryness.

I have never had a calfhide hoop 'slip off a hoop." I have some drum heads from the 30's and some maybe older and the drums still sound great after I've retucked them on other drums. My 'glue' method was first used only because there was NO way to have the hide stick or stay on the wood fleshhoop. It was initially an experiment to see if it would work and indeed if I could use the head tone-wise. It worked and the drum (the bass drum in the first photo above) sounds great....lots of tone. Now when I have an old calfhide head and I have difficulty tucking it....I use 'the glue method' rather than disgarding the old calfhide. It works for me. But, I'm NOT a pro drummer making high-end recordings or playing in a band. Having said that.....when I did play ....for a very megar living in the 60's and 70's....a friend added a bass drum to a recording he was making -----he used the arm of a sofa armchair. Wild huh. But it worked and sounded like a great bass drum. I'm OT.....just saying....

Thanks for valuable input, but the very reason for re-tucking this old head is to see if and how it performs compared to a new one. So far, I am pretty satisfied with the result.

Thanks, great. If the head sounds and feels fine, then it must be fine.

/Magnus

I hold the head in place artificially until it dries. There used to be tools for this because the "glue" in the heads is unreliable , whether on new or old skin. I bought 2 of them on ebay for a 14" drum and will adapt one eventually into a 13 or 12" version-----basically ,they are a set of wooden hoops with long screws and wingnuts that mimick the hardware on a drum. when fitted on an old shell, they clamp the heads in place until dry. Alternately, fit the head on an old drum and leave until dry.

Once the skin is wrapped around the fleshhoop sufficiently and dried, any glue is pretty much superfluous because during tightening, the pressure of the hoop clamping the skin against the tucked under skin , pretty much kills any slippage.

Where I have used glue, is when I am cutting up an old head in order to make smaller ones and the skin is a little small. Cyanoacrylate glue's original application was to bond skin, so surprise, it works quite well( I also use it to glue a calf patch on bass drum batters). You could also use hide glue, still widely available for use by Luthiers. It comes as dried crystals and needs to be mixed but it is a little messy. Titebond makes a bottled hide glue which isn't quite as good as the real deal but it is convenient.

Hey Calfskin,

And thanks for some interesting points. I already do as you suggest and fit the newly mounted head on the drum to dry. This worked very well on the old head I re-tucked. The problem here was the actual tucking, where the tucks tended to slip out again. To avoid this slippage, I had to do quite a quick and comparatively sloppy job, slapping the head onto the drum (a 13" Sonor Phonic tom) to dry, hoping for the best. As it turns out, the head sounds great and - again, as you suggest - the tucking holds out well due to the shrinking etc of the dry skin. My only gripe with the way this head turned out is that due to the haste with which I had to do the tucking, a couple of the tucks show through as dents over the bearing edge of the drum. This does not seem to affect the sound of the head, fortunately.

In retrospect, I wonder if the problem I had with this head may have been not the glue aspect, but rather that the head had been mounted on the flesh-hoop for so many years and that the skin wanted to resume its tucked shape, thus slipping out of the shape into which I wanted to tuck it. (It was originally on a 14" flesh-hoop, but with very little tucking margin, so I decided to mount in on a 13" hoop instead, to get more leftover skin to tuck with.) Perhaps the problem would not have occurred if I had soaked the head longer than I did?

Thanks for the pointer to the various kinds of glue. And your tip about calf patching bass drum heads is genious. Thank you so very very much for that! I have been using the regular plastic bass drum patches available from Evans and Remo for that purpose, but your idea is so much better. And I do have some old broken heads to use for that!

Best,

Magnus

very glad to be of help. ---regarding the patch. I cut it dry. If it is really flat, you can moisten it with a brush on the inside surface put on the glue and then keep pressed( books, bricks, etc.) until dry. Contact cement has worked for that application pretty good too.

if it is a bit wrinkled, I moisten it and press it until dry , then proceed with a nice even flat piece.

I also have found thicker pieces of calf are the best. good luck on those.

Thanks again for the above, very useful information. So you are a regular calf-skin player?

/Magnus