Drum Care

How to care for your Drum

Because of the way the rawhide is made it is not necessary to apply any oils to the drum head.
Quite often a drum does need to be retightened during its life.
If a drum gets loose or does not stay tight in average temperature and humidity, it is probably time for a retightening.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
The main idea is to resaturate the hide and then dry it.
What this does, is allow the rawhide to loosen up completely
and when you dry it again it can slip just a little where it needs to.
The easiest way we have found to resaturate the rawhide is to just wait for a rainy day (a real cloudy drizzly day is best),
lay the drum flat on one side for a while and flip it over every hour or so depending on how hard it is raining.
Like we said the idea is to get it well saturated.
A drum with fairly thick hides can take a while, maybe 8 to 10 hours.
This will not hurt our painted drums, but you do have to be a little more carefull
not to scratch or rub the painting to much while the rawhide is wet.
Also try not to let the drum get a puddle of water on just one side,
because this will let more water go inside the drum.
After you think the drum is good and resaturated,
take it into one of your warmer rooms and redry it using a small fan.
You want it to dry fairly quickly. But you don’t want to use extreme heat, 80° to 90 ° is good.
It should be completely redried in 1 ½ to 2 days.
The other way you can resaturate smaller drums is by using wet towels.
Just get three our four towels that are white or beige wet and completely wrap the drum for 1 ½ to 2 days.
During this time you may have to rewet the towels once or twice.
Then just redry the same as the other method.
After you have done this to your drum once or twice over a period of time
you will find it will stay tight even in fairly cool humid conditions.

Dave Hansen & Sonja Holy Eagle
P.O. Box 75
Rapid City, SD 57709

phone ( 605 ) 348-2421

mail us

info@dakotadrum.com

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