That definitely seems like the only likely conclusion. I'm going to take it apart (possibly this weekend) and see what happened.Is that a part that can be swapped out? Or is this thing pretty much toast?
It'll be hard to find just the crossbar. Even if you do, it wouldn't be cost effective when you can buy Speed Kings for anywhere from, $35.00 to $100.00 or so. Probably cheaper and faster to buy another pedal.
John
.99 and 8.50 to ship it.. right now anyway. ;)
If you do decide to repair... I think I have a couple parts pedals in the basement... let me know.
After over 40 years of occassional use, my SK snapped in the same place. (See the red arrow.) I salvaged as many parts as I could and bought a new one.
I snapped the exact same thing, around 1988. Ticked me off. I thought that was a ridiculous place for the pedal to break. Lost my faith in the SK.
Bought DW 5000 pedals.......
Never looked back.
Dan
I had one in for repair 4 or 5 years ago. I sold him a rebuilt , that I had just done. The bearings were both functional on the broken one. The leverage against that part of a pedal is most upon impact-----moreso on larger drums with the beater extended. The guy was a professional session drummer, totally loved speed kings and played very hard-----his pedal was pretty well worn by the time I got to it. I rebuild/sell/clean/adjust microscopes off and on as well, so I put the broken surfaces under a 30x stereo-mic. and the casting was very structurally weak at that point. The crystals were very large ,coarse and malformed. It was clearly a lousy casting . It looked to me like the break had occurred in stages. There was a small amount of oxidation where an unnoticed hairline crack had taken place sometime ago and then perhaps the pedal got loose and went askew , causing a twisting effect against an already weak point.
I've never had this happen while playing one, but over the years I've encountered about ten of them broken exactly like this in the bottom of trap cases when purchasing used kits. Always thought that it was most likely caused by dropping them or from shock damage when in transport between gigs. Of course it's also possible that a bad run of castings was installed at some point in the manufacturing history. Once during performance on a 70's Ludwig Big Beat kit one of the 'L' tom mount arm holders in the double mount snapped in half, whereby I watched the 13" tom crash to the stage and roll off into the audience! Again an extremely rare occurrence. I have also encountered a Sonor Phonic double tom tom holder with one of the tom mount arms snapped off flush to the ratchet. Upon close inspection it seems that one or more 'bubbles' formed deep inside the metal during the casting process and this was the culprit leading to the fracture. I have never heard of a Speed King breaking brand new right off the showroom floor. Considering how many Ludwig Speed Kings there are on the planet vs how few incidents of breakage I'd say that such things are inevitable when seen in the perspective of almost a century of drum making. Even with these few incidents I rate older Ludwig products as being the best of quality in sound, design and manufacturing, and dependability.
