 Hello and welcome to the Drum History Podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today we are joined by Bernie Stone of Stone Custom Drum. Bernie, how are you? I'm doing okay. How are you doing today? Good. Good. Thanks for being here. We are talking about your involvement with the classic American brand Slingerland in light of the recent acquisition of Slingerland by DW Drums. And I want to say right off the bat that this has never happened before that I was recommended in the same day by two people, Steve Hatfield and Rob Cook, both same day said you need to talk to Bernie. So I know something right is happening. But yeah, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement with Slingerland and take it away? Okay. Well, you know, as a young man growing up taking drum lessons, some of my first drums were secondhand drums and among those were Slingerland. I get actively playing and by nature I'm interested in how things are made and I acquired an old radio king snare drum and eventually become friends with a gentleman named Charlie Donnelly. And this is way in the early days of when modern drummer came out and Charlie was a consultant to the magazine back then. So I got a great education on the history of Slingerland from Charlie and then eventually got into the collecting thing like a lot of us are today. You know, we fast forward a little bit, you know, I get out playing and as a working musician, I started really picking up drums and building them and refurbishing them. And that led to me getting a part-time job at Columbus Pro Percussion, which I became the guy who did the repairs and you know, I did that for a couple of years and I worked with Jim Rupp who's a jazz legend drummer and Bob Brighthop who is a dean at Capitol University. From there, I started finding myself doing, you know, really special projects for percussionists, marching bands, schools, then that started leading into doing a lot of custom finish work and early on I discovered, you know, just from knowing people in the industry, discovered the Keller Shell and that led to doing a lot of custom snare drums and so on and so forth. Well, after being at Columbus Pro Percussion for a couple of years, some of us older guys, we know the Percussion Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Well, Neil Graham, the proprietor of the Percussion Center, gave me a call one evening and said he'd like to talk to me about coming here and working. After a little bit of negotiation, I found myself at age 22, moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana and immediately, I mean, I'm talking from the day I walked into the door in 1984, my responsibilities were dealing with high profile touring bands, doing special projects for Tama, for Ludwig, some of the largest drum cores, you know, largest universities, that stuff was my responsibility and I did that for about, I believe I was employed there until 1990. So, you know, after the Percussion Center had some problems later on, Neil Graham decided to keep the manufacturing portion of that and I more or less found myself unemployed. So, I started running ads in modern drummer, you know, custom drum work, you know, Bernie Stone calling me and I did that for several years, well into the 90s, about 92, 93 and had a little shop at my old house, 24 by 24, two-car garage, had it set up as a little custom shop and I did a lot of stuff during that period. Well, having a young kid and having a kind of working for myself and at the time I was playing quite a bit, the opportunity to take a corporate job came up, which I did and then shortly thereafter, I landed a premium playing gig, which I still have today. Well, the corporate job I took because it had benefits and so on, so forth. So, I started really laying off of the custom stuff. Well, fast forward to around 2001, come home from a gig one night and my guitar player sent me a message, hey, did you see this on eBay? And it was the Slingerland equipment. And so, I'm like, wow, that's interesting. And of course, I didn't really know what I was looking at. What I did know is I seen similar equipment in use at the Ludwig factory back in the 80s. I actually went to Chicago one day and walked in the front door and said, hey, can I take a factory tour? And they're like, what? And I said, yeah. So some old man about 80 years old took me around. I spent the whole day at Ludwig just walking around looking at stuff. And one of the things that fascinated me most was the drum shell making assembly line. And I remembered looking at that going, I have to know how this works. So when I'm looking at this stuff in eBay ad, I'm going, you know, that's exactly what, like what I've seen at Ludwig. Well, anyhow, the original listing that we looked at, I believe the reserve is $30,000. And I'm going, well, you know, yeah, yeah, that's not something you, yeah, that's not something you put in your garage. You know, and it got up to about $12,000 or $13,000, if I remember right. So, you know, it goes off no reserve, it comes back on. And then I seen the reserve was $10,000. Well, it got up to about $9,000 and went off no sale. Well, a couple of weeks later, it went up at no reserve. I go, oh, now you're talking. Yeah. So, you know, of course, like, like usual, I didn't really ask my wife for permission. Of course. I started bidding on this stuff, right? And lo and behold, I won it. And they called me right away and said, were you just bidding on this or did you intend to buy it? I said, well, I intend to buy it. And the guy says, okay, well, it has to be off of our premise, December 21st. I go, dude, that's Saturday. This is Thursday. He says, if you don't want it, I'll relist it. And I said, okay, I'll be there. Yeah. Once again, this didn't go over well with my wife. No. Geez. Well, let me ask you though, like before you go on 2001, you said, right, why were they selling this stuff at that point in time? Do you know what happened? Like the factory, like it was just sitting in an old factory then? Yeah, actually, I can tell you exactly what it was. The reason my guitar player was following these listings is he's a gratch guy. He was seeing this stuff that was being listed by a company called MusicalCloseouts.org or something like that. And every once in a while, he would see Slingerlin stuff. Well, as most of us know now, Fred Gretchen bought the Slingerlin name assets and holdings and it was in Ridgeline, South Carolina. Well, he said every once in a while that they would show Slingerlin stuff and then this stuff popped up. So I, you know, make arrangements with the guy from musicalcloseouts.org, had to pay for it before I got there with certified funds and it had to be off the premises December 21st. First of all, I said, well, where do I need to go? And he gave me the address, whatever it was, Kings Highway, Ridgeline, South Carolina. I go, dude, that's the gratch factory because you are to understand that you are not purchasing this from Gratch. This is from musicalcloseouts.org. Oh my gosh. And I go, okay, yeah, whatever. Yeah, who cares? So, so I had a buddy who was a truck driver. He said that's not that's because that's about 12 hour drive. I've been there before. Yeah. Yeah. So I rented a truck, drove it down to Ridgeline. We get down there, spend a night, we go to the factory and pick it up. And there's another guy there. He bought some older drum shell manufacturing equipment, Slingerlin's production stuff from the 1920s. Wow. And yeah. And we got to talking and, you know, he, he bought that stuff and I bought the radio frequency stuff. So anyhow, get the stuff, get it back to Indiana. I don't have a place to put it. A buddy of mine, who's an electrical engineer says, well, you can put it in my pole barn and we'll take a look at it this spring. So spring comes along and he was a plant engineer at Dana Axel Corporation. And he said they used a lot of, a lot of similar equipment and heat treating and metal forging. And when he was in the Navy, he was a microwave sonar and radar technician. So he knew a little bit about it. And the first thing he said to me, he's, he says, well, I hope you didn't pay too much for it because something this specialized, you have to know how it works. And you don't have a schematic diagram and you don't have an operator's manual. He said, but you do have about $7,000 worth of scrap here. Oh God. Wow. So it's very worse. I could have scrapped it out and got my money back. Well, spring comes along and we're looking at skids of stuff, you know, the only thing that you could really recognize were the radio frequency generators and the molds. And it took us a couple of months to figure out what parts went where. Okay. So, you know, summer goes by and we're into the fall. We've got one machine kind of assembled and it works on industrial three phase power, which we didn't have, but we figured we could run it on single phase. Well, Jim calls me one day and says, I need you to come out here. I got something to show you. I get out to his pole barn and he's got the machine up and I noticed there was wiring going to it. And he says, flip the switch. And I flip the switch and the tubes come on, operates on tubes. And I go, wow, that's pretty cool. He goes, well, do you know how to make drum shells? I said, man, I don't have a clue. Well, that started the process of, well, drum shells are made of wood. Where do you get the wood? So we get into the end of the year and I kind of figured out that buying veneer was a learning experience. I actually found a guy here in Fort Wayne that had a cabinet shop and he had a whole, whole skid of veneer. He sold me for like 70 bucks, you know, four foot high and 10 feet long. So I started by putting veneer into the molds and glued them up with just regular wood glue. And boy, the process works. There's a, there's a inflatable bladder that drops down inside to put air pressure to it. And you're supposed to get a drum shell. Well, every time I turned the machine on, it would, all the red lights had come up and it would say plate overload and nothing. And this went on for a year, year and a half. Could never get it to do that without going into an overload. I'm about two years into this and it was failure after failure after failure. You know, we knew how the machines went together. We could get them to turn on, but you put wood and glue in it. And so I started, you know, started digging around on the internet and I couldn't find anybody that knew anything about manufacturing with radio frequency. What I could find was the company that manufactured these machines. I called them, they thought they had the schematics to them. They spent a couple of weeks looking and they informed me that those were on microfilm and they had a company fire a couple of years earlier and those were burned up in the fire. But she did say, she did say, I do know that Slingerlin had three of those machines and so did the Ludwig drum company. Well, I made a phone call to Ludwig and they weren't really interested in talking to me. No. Well, here, pause for a sec. Can you tell us how our radio frequencies use to actually make a drum shell? Yeah, let me, let me give you a real dissertation on that. What you're doing is you're taking, you're taking raw wood and if you know anything about woodworking, the moisture content is everything. So to have a stable wood piece, the moisture content needs to be 4% or below. Well, a lot of situations where I get it, it's much higher than that. Well, radio frequency is great for that. Plus, you need a glue and the glue has a catalyst in it that responds to the radio frequency and what the catalyst does, it distributes the radio frequencies equally through the glue, through the glue line. And the way, the way this works is every other piece has a glue line in it. And if you're making plywood, of course, to have your grain run the same way, it's an odd number of panels, okay? If you're using six plies, you have to invert one of the panels in order to make grain run the correct way. And I can elaborate on that later. Anyhow, you dimensionally cut your wood, you put it into the mold, you glue up every other panel, the bladder drops in, you inflate it and you have to have a certain amount of PSI for this to all work, okay? You can't just put it in and inflate it to something and you have to have a known PSI. Some of this stuff is real proprietary and I won't elaborate on that. Sure. Once you get your stuff into the mold, like I said, you've got up to a five minute cycle time and you have a microwave oven, right? What happens when you put your food in? The plate doesn't get hot, but anything that has moisture content gets hot. A radio frequency does the exact same thing. The radio frequency passes in a sine wave through the load in the mold and what it does is it cures out the glue line. It doesn't heat. It doesn't heat. Heat is a byproduct of the process and heat is a byproduct, steam is also a byproduct. So what comes out is a piece of molded wood, formed molded plywood and when it's done, it should have a relative moisture content of less than 4% and the glue lines are glued out and it's actually the best way to manufacture multiple pieces of wood. Like I said before, I started looking for everything I could find about radio frequency on the internet and I'm about two and a half years into this and I talked to some guys online and they give me little tidbits of information, but never enough to really help me. A lot of this stuff, there's a lot of math involved and I stumbled across a paper from the Library of Congress and it had something to do with a plywood company that helped engineer this process in the late 1930s and the process was for making flat plywood because prior to World War II, plywood was done in a cold press and the the warehouser wood company somehow got involved in this process and it was to make plywood for like the D-Day landing craft and for stuff for the military because they knew that it was going to be a war pretty soon and this information at one time was classified in top secret, which I thought was kind of interesting. So after World War II, manufacturing with radio frequency became a real common process in a lot of industries, most likely the wood industry and what's involved is to make use for making molded plywood products, which we hardly do any of in the United States anymore, and what you do is you take your wood panels, you press them together and most molds have a male and female part and you sandwich the plies in the glue between the you know the forms and then turn them out your piece when it comes off and it was used commonly for making molded plywood products. Now to make a drum shell it's a little similar to that except your male and female part is your exterior mold and your bladder. So I started piecing all this together and believe it or not, my daughter who was in middle school at the time was helping me with the mathematics because it has some complicated math. Yeah, what I was able to figure out is no matter what you're making there's a there's a formula for load resistance and load resistance has has to equal ohms value and so on and so forth and that was actually real crucial to know because one day I had my daughter out of the shop looking at this stuff and she said dad did you see this I said what and she found she found some mathematical equations on the inside of one of the machines and I said what is that she said well this is a this is an input formula for voltage to resistance to ohms and it gives you a gives you a maximum power output rating and I'm talking about a 10 year old kid. Wow. So like I said I started putting things together with the mathematic formulas I found in in the warehouser document and what my daughter was able to teach me and and then you know I get some news from my buddy Jim that he's retiring selling this farm and I needed to move my equipment so I had to disassemble everything move it out towards New Haven Indiana and I set up shop in the old international harvester factory it's like a big industrial park now and I'm I'm in the center section of it then about 5,000 square feet. One how I get set up out there and you know we fast forward to about 2008-2009 and my kids are getting older the demands of my corporate job are are much less and I've got a little bit of spare time I get out there every night trying to trying to make drums and I'm I'm still failing at this right so one night I'm out there waiting for my kids to get done with soccer practice and had a couple hours to kill and I put some wood and glue into the molds filled them up and then I thought well you know this thing has to work because I'm just doing something wrong and well you know you're you're in you're in a sound engineering and believe it or not I thought well when a when sound engineer walks into a room he's never mixed before he EQs everything flat you know he neutralizes every setting on the board and then he works from there so everywhere that I knew there was a calibration on a machine I put it I put it to right in the middle between zero and 10 and I thought well we'll start there did the whole thing like I've done at least 200 times before wooden glue inflate the bladders this time I hit the switch and no red lights all green lights the gauges come up and it's it's just making this humming sound and I'm going oh my god and then I then I put my hands on the mold and I go oh man it's getting warm and uh you know these machines have a five minute timer on them so I'm sitting there and I'm you know watching the timer it clicks off and the mold's warm I go to take the bladder out and I'm going oh man the bladders glued to the inside of the mold and I literally I literally had to puncture the bladder to get everything out wow well from there I knew well I know how I know I know this thing works so so I started really looking on where to get wood glue so on so forth I did a little bit of research and found out that there are certain glues out there that you use with radio frequency and there are certain glues that you don't well right around the corner from where I'm at was a guy who had a glue factory so I walked in there one day said look uh I've got this radio frequency stuff uh he goes yeah this is what you need you give me two gallons of glue and said take this and cry it and he explained to me that uh it has catalyst in it if it doesn't have the catalyst in it it won't react you'll end up with a mess which is what I had so I took the glue uh got into my skid of wood and dimensionally cut everything and uh believe it or not man that was the first drum shell come out pretty good so I started making shell after shell after shell and I said well you know piece and little pieces of veneer together there's got to be a better way to do it than this and eventually you know my contacts led me to a place that does rotary cut veneer you can buy it raw and have it cut to your specs and then when I stumbled into that I started making some pretty nice shells uh the problem I was having though was like I said the drum the machines have a five minute timer on it I know it works but I don't know how to calibrate the machine for each drum shell size sometimes it would take me an hour to make one drum shell I said man there's no way you ran a production with making one shell an hour so during this period of time I got with the Indiana Center of Small Business Development I started Stone Custom Drum as an LLC and I started the process to get the black oval and I with my first name show I maybe had 25 shells and fly out to Anaheim I got a booth I've got a table and stack them up on the table and got a banner hanging up and so I come in the next morning and my shells are scattered everywhere and I got figure prints all over them I'm like what the hell so I'm in I'm in the booth you know and people start drifting through and so I've got my little story I'm telling you know well you know I make drum shells and I thought there was an alternative to what's out there and and they would inevitably ask well did you make these yeah I made them well how'd you make them so well I purchased the original slingerland tooling man they their eyes get real big the next thing you know people are coming over and they're they're wanting to know the story I say yeah and then I think Rob Cooke was among them he says I had no idea you were the guy who bought this he says you know everybody wondered where it went from the old eBay auction I said well I've had it for some time and it's taken a while to put it together and make shells and now here I am well this was 2011 I kept going back to NAMM every year and year and first I started doing drum shells and then I did snare drums and and after first NAMM show I did a few shells for uh well I actually landed a big account for a company called Kala brand and I was building uh banjo ukulele shells for them for a couple of years cool and yeah that was I was doing okay with that and I'd get a lot of guys you know who were doing the color shell thing looking for something different and I underestimated I I assumed the need for boutique type shells was much larger because I what I was getting a lot of is one of this two of that one of this it's really hard to do that you know sure so I thought well next year I'm going to go back with snare drums so I did and guys are like why didn't know you built drums too oh yeah you know I've got a deep history in drum building well I ended up getting with some marketing people so we started marketing stone custom drum by this time I'd secured I'd secured the trademark for the black oval and and that they had no challenges uh no opposition uh you know at the time Gibson had owned slingerland so I researched all that heavily and I found out that you know that was open and available and was in a case of abandonment and my thinking was well you know I have a lineage to slingerland I should you know I should run with this yeah you know I'd also like to point out it was never my intention to be to be slingerland or be just like slingerland I just wanted to I just wanted the heritage aspect of it and to this point in time that's what I feel like I've done but you know I should probably I should probably back up a little bit after my first nam show that I told you I'd had some issues with making drum shells in five minutes I just got back from the nam show and a guy called me and said hey I understand you own the original slingerland tooling I say yeah that's right and he goes can you describe it to me I go well it's two Reeves RF generators uh they're about yay why gay big uh I've got a whole series of molds and bladders they look like this and he goes my god that's it and I said yeah why he goes well I'll have you know that when I was in college I worked at slingerland for a couple years I go really he goes yeah I go did you ever see this equipment in operation he goes yes I go did you ever operate any of this equipment he goes no do you know anybody who's ever operated this equipment he goes yes I go is that person still alive he goes yes that person is my dad and he ran a woodshop at slingerland for 22 years I said I need to talk to your dad I go do you live in Chicago he goes we live in Chicago so I had it over to Chicago I met Jim took him some shells and then uh I showed his showed his dad he's a very nice gentleman I said these are the machines I have I have questions so I started asking him and he would say have you ever done this I said yeah he says well when you do this you got to do this this and this so I started really taking notes and he says does the machine ever make this noise I say yes he goes when it does that you got to do this this and this and like I said I started putting everything together and when I when I got home from that trip to Chicago I drove straight out to the factory put some wood and glue into the molds bam I was knocking them out in three minutes that's awesome wow and uh Jim Moritz's dad had a couple of the key pieces of evidence that I needed and you know I may have stumbled into that later on but uh the stuff he told me was crucial in order to to run the shells the way I do that's funny I should say that that's Jim Moritz who was on a very early episode that everyone can check out I think it was called growing up slingerland and it was in the first five episodes um so that's Jim of Chicago drum great guy great family um so carry on just want to give Jim a shout out oh yeah well uh this same year like I said just got back from Nam and just got some crucial information from Jim Jim and his dad and then uh Rob Cook calls me and and he says you know uh you haven't been to the Chicago drum show in a while and would like to have you here and I said well I was planning on coming this year and he goes well good I'll get you a booth set up and would you like to you know give a presentation on on the equipment and I said yeah I'd love to so I did that and that kind of you know everything starts snowballing after after this and now everyone knows that I have the slingerland equipment and I'm getting more of these boutique guys who want shells and and so I'm doing okay and what I'm finding out is now I've got two machines up and running and I'm running out of space and I'm making a little bit of money and I'm buying more equipment and actually moved into a larger space at the industrial park then I go to another Nam show and this time you know I've got drum sets man I've got a full booth looks really really well and I'm up up in the middle where everything's happening and I'm picking up more and more clients and things have gone that way ever since pretty much that's how stone custom drum come about the ultimate goal for me was to uh you know have a brand that represents you know not only do I have the the DNA heritage of a great American company but I'm also not stereotype is that that I'm doing my own thing I believe I've kind of successfully done that because really you know I've got things that we started to refer to that nobody else does I refer to the three ply shell with the reinforcement rings as as a chicago style shell then I started doing the nile style shell which is a five ply maple poplar and and since since I started referring to the nile shell you know those two terms have become synonymous with my company now not only that I have several other shell platforms that I do uh I've got a seven ply that you know is based around a solid cherry uh center core with razor thin mahogany it ends up being seven ply and uh well and along with that I've done a lot of uh you know hardware fabrication the ultimate goal for me is have everything every nut and bolt manufactured in the united states yeah yeah and that kind of goes with that old school uh you know the way drums used to be where things would obviously be you know done a lot more in-house and not done as much overseas um and they're beautiful drums um which I recommend everyone goes online to your website um and check some out which that's stonecustomdrum.com correct right yeah and and there's some really cool pictures um it's wild how this is from the factory and just how you found how jim's dad was the guy who could help you because he had to be there because there was no other way to figure this stuff out my 10 year old daughter you know yeah you know first of all um I really love history and knowing that I own a crucial part of American drum history is huge for me and you know building my own brand and and having that dna legacy is also huge for me uh you know with the recent purchase of the slingerland brand name from gibson by dw and I didn't know why for the last couple of weeks but man my website has been has been getting hit real hard along with my facebook page and then when the news broke I guess it was two weeks ago monday man I found out like at eight oh five in the morning probably right after it was announced several people hit me up and did you hear this did you hear this and so I'm like well that's interesting well yeah let's talk about that because I'd love to get your opinion on that because obviously um well let me ask the first question was the slingerland name something you ever went after acquiring I know you've said you wanted to do your own thing and be your own company which you've successfully done did you ever want to try and become actually actually yeah I looked into it very seriously and what I found out was uh of course we know we all know how gibson was mismanaged and nearly run into the ground I actually had people in place at high levels that were feeding the information on all this at gibson so I got some inside information about it and plus all the all the documents that you could actually find if you research it online and what I found out was the brand named slingerland was tied up in in leans I guess you would say bank of america actually owned it we actually contacted bank of america and and the way my attorneys explained it to me they'll have a big garage sale of this stuff if whoever had it originally you know goes into failure or default so we tried looking at it at that angle and then uh as we all know uh jc curly stepped in uh they restructured gibson and from what I understand gibson's doing pretty good right now they sold off a lot of stuff that was dragging them down uh some of that was uh the warehouse in arkansas where a bunch of the radio king stuff was stored hmm from what I understand they had no idea they even owned that warehouse yeah that that's how much in disarray it was yeah it's such a I mean gibson's a mega company slingerland was a large company I you know that's kind of weird they don't know they have that stuff but I could see that where it's like oh yeah you can see that you know yeah now in the last couple years I've been relatively quiet about everything like I mentioned I took a corporate gig and two years ago I was severely injured on the job and I've had two major shoulder surgeries and it nearly cost me my business uh because at the time I was doing a lot of volume through sweetwater and you know without getting real into it I ended up losing sweetwater and I had about 50 grand out and man it nearly it nearly destroyed me yeah you know like I said I'm huge on the history thing and to lose this equipment as a business failure would have been real painful and but the easy thing to do would have been go bankrupt let the bank sell everything off you know change my name move to fiji never be heard from again right yeah of course I I take the hard path so in the last couple years I managed to sell off almost all of my pre-built inventory you know at one time I was able to have 10 guys on the shop floor uh right now it's just Jeff and myself you know I mean it was pretty hard hit to take oh sure and but but things are looking real rosy right now uh in the last week I've had several several people come at me about investment capital and oh so I'm yeah I'm looking at uh bringing in investment partners and expanding yeah well that's amazing because I guess you know I think when Slingerland or any company is in the news you're in the discussion and because it's the real deal equipment um now then the question would be what's your take on DW doing it what do you think how do you think that's going to go what do you what do you think about that whole thing actually you know my situation isn't too unlike DW's humble beginnings you know you remember they had they had what they thought was camco and they got into a legal battle with tama and it is the way it turned out you know DW ended up with the the hardware and all that stuff and tama just ended up with a name you know it's kind of that same situation you know DW makes a makes a fine product in the last couple years they've they've got a huge distributorship that there's several brands that fall under their umbrella uh you know john good has been very good about you know how they market DW that questions come at me and I'm I'm not really sure what to really think about it other than I know DW makes a high-end product and make a nice product they had humble beginnings like myself and then I get a lot of this well maybe you should work with DW well that's something I would consider now be quite honest with you I don't know that john good even knows who the hell I am yeah you know I mean that's that's a tough they've got a lot going on obviously but I'm thinking maybe they'll look deeper into the slinger lens stuff like that or maybe they'll just say we've got the name we're going to try and match the quality and build it in a similar way but um did slingerland always use the RF shell production yeah well that's a good question I mentioned earlier on that uh when I got down there a guy had purchased the uh the old uh cold form stuff and the weight the weight yeah the way that process worked is they they took a large you know a large tube mandrel and they just wrapped three plies around it and then wrapped a piece of canvas around it and let it sit till the glue dried wow slow process there I'm sure slow process yeah and that the way I understand it and this was from Jim Moritz and his dad was that system was being used up until about 1956 or seven uh Jim's dad was a little cloudy in what year they actually got the new RF equipment and Jim's dad also confirmed with me that they had three machines okay uh and he pointed out that the two machines I have were the best ones that's good and yeah and I also pointed out to him that I have what I think are the remnants left over from a third machine I have several parts and pieces that I know went to a different machine so now Jim's dad also pointed out that one of the machines went to Shelbyville Tennessee and for a while they built drums down there and the way I understand it they were three ply with oak reinforcement rings okay so the only thing I can you know demise from that is that you know that that didn't work out so well they got the machine back and uh took it out of commission and that's why I have spare parts well it's good to have a donor you know like donor parts because I don't think uh you're going to get on craigslist and find um parts for your Slingerland uh RF machine sitting around well you you know what uh the funny thing is like I mentioned in the 50s and 60s this was real common technology today it's not so common and to find anyone who knows anything about it uh they're either those guys are either in their 80s or they're dead yeah so uh I've probably I've probably become the country's foremost leading authority on manufacturing around plywood now now with that being said you know one of one of the things that was real fortunate that came my way was about a week after I got back from meeting with Jim Moritz I got a phone call and this guy says hey I need somebody to come over and tune a drum set for me and I go thinking to myself good lord I can walk you through that on the phone dude you know this drum set for my kid and uh I saw your ad and how much do you want I'll pay you whatever you want and I surely thought well nobody would give you a hundred bucks to tune a drum set right so I say yeah how about a hundred bucks he goes can you be here at noon tomorrow I said yeah all right yeah I find out he lives about a mile from me so I'm walking over and it's a pretty exclusive neighborhood and walking up the driveway there's a Ferrari in the garage I'm going man I should have charged you more money we get down to his uh basement and it was a pearl export kit and you know with the with the Paul Jameson rack and stuff and you know set it up and there's a nice array of zildjian symbols and you know he says yeah I paid like 2000 bucks did I get a good deal I said yeah man it's a great deal because there's three thousand dollars worth of zildjian symbols yeah yeah so I put them together and tuned them up and I'm sitting there kind of looking and I spotted a couple pieces of electrical equipment then I spotted an RF meter and I said hey uh I don't want to be nosy but what do you do for a living well he says I'm an electrical engineer and I specialize in microwave radar and uh radio frequency I said radio frequency he says yeah he says uh mainly uh security systems satellite systems RFID tags I go do you know anything about this I got my laptop out and showed him some pictures of the insides of one of the machines and man his eyes got really big he says those have tubes in them I said yeah he goes when can I see it I go anytime you want yeah so it turns out you know you're familiar with invisible fence the dog fences this guy basically invented it whoa yeah he's done really well for himself so this guy's a successful entrepreneur and he sort of took me under his wing and when he's seen the machinery he goes uh because you know I have an idea on how we could do this with another machine and so we started building solid state machines and I use them for uh I use them mainly for really large bass drums uh bass drum hoops and then we build a machine where uh we use RF and we have a handheld unit that I glue the reinforcement rings in because they don't have to sit all night man that's awesome you're kind of modernizing the process um it makes me wonder how many shells could Slingerland have been pumping out per day with the old RF machinery yeah Jim Jim Moritz his dad told me uh on a good good day man he could make a hundred uh hundred shells a day himself wow and if you've got three machines in operation you know you're knocking out 300 shells a day that's that's some serious demand yeah exactly and this would have been at the peak of that kind of like gene group uh drummers or the celebrity kind of uh era right but what what I'd also like to point out is I can do stuff that fast also but let's step back in time uh the build quality on a lot of that stuff isn't like the build quality that I'm expected to produce yeah so yeah I mean build quality is much more you know much more proficient nowadays when you're competing with uh hand-built stuff and stuff like say what DW and Ludwig produced today I mean it has to be top notch yeah so me cranking out a hundred snare drums in an afternoon well I could do it but you know build quality is not going to be there geez yeah you know one one of the other things I do is uh I do uh you're familiar with the old Brooklyn style Gratch yep I'm an OEM manufacturer for a company who sells sells those type of drums and they hit me every once in a while with big purchase orders and I've actually I've actually run 65 shells in a six hour period start to finish myself and that's that's that's cutting the wood making the shells uh sanding them and putting them in the box oh man it's just you better focus and get it done yeah that particular shell is really hard to make because you have to steam bend you have to steam bend the maple first and yeah well one of the one of the other things with the radio frequency equipment is instead of taking days and weeks for a steam bent piece to cure out you can do it in 15 minutes gosh you can cycle yeah you can cycle it three times and it's done I mean again that's just so cool and and it helps you stand out to by using that process as kind of your thing because if no one else is doing it that's really cool well I was going to say that the only two companies in the world that are even doing it are myself and Ludwig so Ludwig still does it is that correct yeah down in a row yeah wow okay well that's good to know yeah because I've the the the process of creating the actual shell I know a lot of companies don't even do it they use color they use things like that so it's it's cool to know that you know the DW process is real similar to what Tama and what they were doing at uh Sakai and those molds are heated like a george form and grill and what they do is they put a a heat set type of resin in with the wood panels and that's how they're done the big difference is you know you're baking something in that situation more or less and what I'm doing is you know I'm passing radio frequency through it and I'm actually drying the product and drying the glue line at the same time so those would be the main differences that's interesting well um as we wrap up here I should tell people that they can um like I said before they can find you online at stonecustomdrum.com and I'm assuming you're going to be at the Chicago drum show this year yeah again which will be the 30th anniversary um which is in May of 2020 so um that's where you and I met originally and I think people can find you and check the drums out and and all that good stuff and just to wrap up I think from what I heard it sounds like there's not hard feelings with the slingerland thing I in my opinion it's better that it's just gonna come back rather than sit in limbo and just be in you know the closet of Gibson forever right I don't know if you agree with that it's just it seems like there's such a shame for it to be wasted well everyone's familiar with DW yeah I think however they approach it you know whatever their slingerland product will be you know will be a nice top-notch product yeah you know it might not be a period correct like mine and like I said you know I never set out to be slingerland yeah exactly I'm just happy to have a lineage to the company DW stuff I'm sure is going to be great I hope they do it right and it's not like sometimes you think of like a band who broke up 30 years ago coming back and starting to release albums it's like it's never quite I don't think I think slingerland's got it's it's history and it was there and then what happens in the future will be it'll be new slingerland and I mean Rogers is coming back with new Rogers stuff so it's well I was I was going to point that out that you know the new Rogers stuff is really pretty nice yes yeah you know it's not quite exactly like the old stuff but I don't know do you really want it made like it was in 1965 exactly it's that was then this is now like I said today we expect better build quality out of everything so yeah yeah awesome well again Bernie Stone stone custom drum Bernie thanks for being on the show today I've had a blast talking with you and learning about your process and it's fascinating it's science right yeah actually there's a lot of science involved and anyone who wants to set themselves apart from being just a boutique Keller guy no matter what you're doing look at look at the science go back to your physics classes and whatever everybody else is doing look at that with a skeptical eye and you know design your product around what you know what you're good at and basic science yeah science and history are the two things that have kept me through this whole thing just yeah turning away at it so perfect well this show is all about history and this falls right in there so all right Bernie then I will I will see you with the Chicago drum show in May and we'll get some pictures with the drums and thanks again for being on the show look forward to seeing you then and I'm pretty excited about hearing the podcast oh yeah people are gonna love it all right bye bye bye Bart I want to give a huge shout out to my good friend Afonso Penne of Delta percussion in Rio de Janeiro Brazil he pretty much instantly became a top tier patron on the patreon page also shout out to his wife Simone his father-in-law Manuel who started the drum shop and he's got a baby girl named Elena on the way so if you're in Brazil in the Rio de Janeiro area you should head over to Delta percussion it's been around since 2006 has one of the largest selections of drums heads sticks everything percussion in that area and it's just a big family so head over there and tell them that drum history sent you