I'm going to give an educated guess of around 1970-71. Serial numbers are sometimes all over the place in regards to year. The lowest I've seen is around 17xxx from 1968 to about 70xxx from 1972. First year 1968 Standard drums had white Resocoat shells and the Granitone began sometime in late 1968 to very early 1969. Many shells do have date stamps, so see if this kit has them. Looks like a very clean S-300 Downbeat!

-Mark

Thanks Mark. I plan to check for date stamps and any labels that might be inside next chance I get (December). I didn't think to look when I was back there for a few days recently, but did at least write down the serial numbers. Thanks for the clues! I'll eventually update the post.

This set is clean as we refer to it, but is a bit dirty. I'll give it a good cleanup at some juncture. Seems all original and apparently only had one other owner before me with GC in between. Unfortunately the hardware was already gone, but it's not too likely I would have used it anyway.

Dan,

Nice looking drums.

I agree with Mark that your drums are most likely from the 1970-71 time frame. Like the main line drums, serial numbers on Ludwig Standards do not precisely match up with the date stamps which may be found on their interiors. However, there is a rough correlation between date stamp and serial number, with serial numbers growing gradually over time.

Standard interiors by this point in time were mainly Granitone, so that is consistent with the time estimate.

When you have a chance to get back to your drums, you may find date stamps (which are a bit hard to spot on the Granitone interiors), you may have paper labels with date stamps or Date Codes on them, or you might find no date stamps at all. Let us know what you discover.

Rick