 Welcome to Drum History, I'm your host Bart van der Zee and I'll be taking you on a trip through time to learn and discover as much as we can about the drums and drummers that came before us. On this episode, I'm talking with Joe Mechler, also known as Joey Boom. He is an authority on World War II era drums and spends much of his time teaching about them at different drum shows and also restoring them to modern standards. We go deep into everything you need to know about war era drums, so sit back and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to the Drum History podcast. Today I am joined by Joe Mechler or as you may know him, Joey Boom. Joe, how are you doing? Good, Bart, doing great. How are you today? It's great to be here. Doing great, it's great to have you on the show and talk to you. So today, we are talking about something that you are very passionate about and that is World War II era drums, something that you have quite the collection of and work in regularly. Why don't we just start off by you explaining to these fine folks a little bit about World War II era drums? Sure, it would be my pleasure. As people may know, I would hope that they would know that the World War II era was quite a special era in time that caused the country to completely alter its day-to-day life and living to put all of the efforts towards the conflicts, the Pacific conflict and also the European. And what it did, one of the things that the War Production Board decided to do is they created what was known as the L37, governmental ruling that meant only 10% of each drum could be made of metal. Now, that was difficult to do with any wind instrument because other than clarinets being predominantly wooden at the time, saxophone, brass instruments, wind instruments were all made of metal. So there was of course a building restriction on manufacturing restriction on those, but what they did with the drums is, as I said, only 10% of them could be metal. So what the drum companies did between 1942 and 1945 is they did their best effort with the best materials available at the time, which of course predominantly was other than metal, was wood, we weren't into deep into plastics and fiberglass and such at that point. So each of the drum companies had their hand in creating instruments, percussion drum instruments that were predominantly made of wood. So in other words, a majority of the normal metal parts on the drum, i.e. being the lugs, the actual snare throw, and but if you will, Slingerland was one of the companies that actually created those out of wood as well as Woodwig, WFL and Leedy also, but they, Leedy and Woodwig also had metal strainers, but they were very small. So they still between the strainers, the tension rods and either a very small metal clip to go on the wood hoops or the rods themselves going through extra thick wood hoops and the badge fell within the 10% ruling that the government mandated in order for them to continue drum manufacturing. Wow, and that's 10% per drum. So overall, okay, wow. Yeah, I would highly recommend for people to look it up online, World War II era drums or Slingerland, most famously the Rolling Bomber because they are like, before I started doing history research for this podcast, I'd never actually heard of them and you look at them and you go, oh my God, what's up with that? And they're beautiful. I mean, they are really strikingly beautiful drums. Yeah, so how did sales go? How did people react to these drums? Well, it actually went pretty well because which in itself is pretty amazing because you have to think in the midst of war time where let's say if someone was happened to be a factory worker as well as a drummer. I mean, one day, all of the manufacturing and production of whatever widget they happened to be making was all of a sudden the next day completely changed where, okay, this is what you're going to be making now. And the time period was a bit tighter financially because the entire country was trying to put as much money, raise as much money as they could to continue this ridiculous war effort going on. So to have any new drum and instrument sales during this period was mind boggling to me. But they were obviously very well because they were new, they were innovative and a lot of people bought into it and purchased these instruments and played them out during this time period which was pretty amazing. I mean, even WFL went as far as creating wooden snare stand, high hat, foot pedal and tone control, which unfortunately, good for them, they tried to fight the good fight there but these pieces just didn't hold up and just didn't last. So a majority of the symbol stands and those things were used from a previous manufacturing and were not manufactured during this time period. So it wasn't like everybody ran out of stands and foot pedals, they just had to use past stock of what they were manufacturing up until the governmental ruling and include that in. But I also have one of the survivor wooden foot pedals and the wooden snare stands and yeah, they were just amazing. And as you said earlier, if people wanna look this up, a fantastic resource is Cooper's Vintage Drums. Yes, I'm looking at it as we speak because it's such a good reference and it's got, and I'm hoping to have Mark Cooper on the show, but it's looking at it like he has one for Ludwig and Ludwig and add for the 1944 victory outfit and it's $195 for the full set, which I mean, in 1944, I don't know the exact number, but that's not cheap. I mean, that is a lot of money, so it's an investment. It is and it was such a spectacular time period that as to piggyback on what you said earlier, one of the things that attracted it to me was when I first started to see them and then just fell in love with this era is they created some unique and beautiful looking instruments. I mean, if you're a fan of drumming and a fan of woodwork, this is for you. I mean, I've had guys roll up to my booth who were woodworkers and look at the collection and such and say, this is just amazing. What's happening here? And then I take him to each of the drum company's drums. It took me a while to acquire not only the collection of each company, but also then the awareness and the knowledge of it so that I could share it with people to give them a little bit of insight in an area where if they know anything of it, the general public would say, oh yeah, sling-o-enrolling bomber. Exactly. They seem to have the moniker over the entire era and every drum company. And when I then begin to say, well, you know, watch it, come on in let me just, let me give you the 10 cent tour. And when I begin to take them around and show them each one of the companies and then each one of the anomalies within the companies, by the time I get to the end, they are like, man, oh man, I had no idea that it was this extensive in this short period of time of the drum companies still competing for as close to top notch as they could or at least still competing just to stay alive. My thought too is in this time with these manufacturers with the changeover from metal parts to wood, how was the tool lane? Like how would they actually create these beautiful wooden lugs? They obviously weren't initially set up to manufacture this type of thing. I mean, was that a big pain in the butt to do this complete retooling of the entire factory or how did that go? Well, pretty much. I mean, what they had to do was, and I'll just give examples pretty much of each drum company, of course, the most popular, Slingerland. I mean, what you have basically is they used predominantly Rosewood in the time where, of course, now Rosewood, you can't get Rosewood anymore. But at that time period, that's what they were predominantly using where the other drum companies were using Walnut and Rock Maple. So for instance, if you look at a Slingerland lug, it is basically a block of Rosewood that then a wood manufacturer, they had to bring in wood manufacturers and carvers, sculptors, to create a jig so that they would be able to then zip, zip, zip, rough cut this stuff and in a mass production situation so that that once they set up that jig, they probably had five or six others because back in the day, the drum companies had drum departments. They had the hoop department, they were making their own hot, well, they were gathering hides and then creating their own drum heads. So they had to just alter their forms of production and have the wood carving and jig area where they just had stockpiles of the raw wood that would come in. It would get cut, cut down to blocks, put into the jigs, zip, zip, they would carve it and curve it all to where it was the desired shape. Then it went to the sander, the finisher and then went to the assembler. One thing I wanna ask you to is so in this time, this is obviously World War II where everyone's pitching in for the war effort. You've got kids pulling wagons down the street, collecting scrap metal, everyone is putting in to help America in the war. Now, I know with C.G. Kahn, the parent company of Ludwig and Ludwig and Leedy, they're doing other stuff. They're not just building drums for the war effort. People were contributing with ammunition and this and that as large corporations. What was going on with that? What would some of these companies be making in addition to drums? Well, a lot of the companies were like, for instance, Rogers. They, Rogers were pretty low on the pole as far as popularity as well as Gretch. I mean, it pretty much was, Slingerland was top notch. They were a drum company predominantly making drums, et cetera. Then Leedy and Ludwig as well, but then when you got into the Gretch and Rogers, you can see that their construction is much more simple. It's a bit primitive, if you will. It just looks more like blocks of wood that are just cut off. Rogers are extremely rare. I have in my collection a Rogers lug. That's it. I don't have a drum because I've never seen one, but due to the fact that I was able to get a lug means they had to make drums somewhere. The reason why that they are low on the pole as well though is because they were designated to make military instruments. Oh, wow. So they were making gauges or altimeters or what have you and there actually is, which I think is on Mark's site is there's actually a picture of a military instrument that would go into a plane and it says Rogers on the faceplate. So they were kind of split duty, double duty on that. As far as how that designation came down from the government on whether they contacted them and said, here's what you're going to do or they volunteered for that, that I don't have that information yet, of course. As many as everyone else, whether they were citizens to serious manufacturers were completely revamping their whole manufacturing existence. The drum companies did too, and some of them were designated to not only produce drums towards the war effort but actually produce instruments, if you will, not musical instruments, additionally towards the war effort as well. Yeah, creating gauges and every little thing. I mean, those have to be worth. If you can find them, I guess, to a drum guy a Rogers gauge from an airplane would be a pretty sought after piece of equipment. It would be amazing. I'm sure there's plenty of land on the bottom of the ocean. You're right, because at this time, this stuff is just, I mean, it's war. I'm sure people aren't thinking, oh my God, this is going to be worth some money. They're thinking I need to get the hell out of here, basically, or run for my life. But let's talk a little bit about the collectability of these drums. I think you are someone who obviously is a collector. You're restoring them. You are bringing them back to life. It's almost something where they're so rare and people don't know about them so much that that must affect the collectability. I'm sure you're now trying to get the word out there and spread the knowledge of these so then the collectability can come up as well. It's, when I started to learn about these more and more, and I just went with my natural attraction to them, I attended the Chicago drum show as a attendee, not as a vendor, of course, and I polled all of the, which I like to call the heavyweights, who are some of the premier and most knowledgeable vintage drum collectors that you will find in the world. And a majority of them are the nicest guys you could ever meet. In any event, I polled each one of them and said, I noticed that at a majority of drum shows, there is a majority of a specific eras of drums and a minority of World War II drums. And I said, my interest is to specialize in that era. I said, I know it's not gonna be a big moneymaker for a couple of reasons. One, the general public is pretty much unaware of that era and the wood replacement and the governmental rolling, et cetera. So in their minds, wood equals potential cracking and breaking. Are they right to think that? Do these, sorry to catch up, but did they break a lot, I mean, in your experience? Well, see, what happens is you have to think about what type of music was being played in the 40s. It certainly wasn't rock and roll, it wasn't back beats, it wasn't amplified music. So at that point, you were only playing with wind instruments at this point, Dixieland and then jazz coming up into that era or parade drums. Again, you're outside, but you're only playing with brass and woodwind instruments. So as the modern day collector, he looks at that going, well, man, I can't go out and play a rock gig on that. Yes, you're right and B, you wouldn't want to. And of course, metal certainly has much more of a longevity just within its own structure. I mean, it could even get rusted solid, it's still gonna function. However, rosewood and wood is natural, it has grain to it. If it is allowed to dry out or if it's susceptible to humidity, it then is prone to cracking. And I've seen some of the rosewood that cracks right along the grain, the very tip chips off. So when guys just immediately look at wood versus metal, they're already like, well, it's not playable and it's gonna break. The other serious situation about it, which was any of the drums prior and then post was the known as the tack heads. And that is they had a tunable head on the top with a set of lugs. And the bottom was affixed permanently to the shell in several different methods, but literally using furniture tacks to keep that head on the bottom of the drum, which means it is not tunable. What companies did is in order to combat the permeation of humidity, which when, at that point, this time period there were no plastic heads. Remo had not invented them yet, even though the Kevlar was available at the time, but only for military use, did it take several years for it to be able to slip into the percussive realm and become plastic heads, which replaced calfskin heads. They would paint the bottom head to not allow the humidity to seep through, even though the inside of the drum was not painted. But they did their best, but I found while restoring some of these drums by carefully removing the paint from the tack head bottom and allowing it to breathe, actually allowed it to sound better to get the weight of that paint off there and allow the humidity to get out of it. So between the potential breakage of the wood, the wood hoops, which some guys are not wood hoop fans, and then the tack bottoms makes this era really not desirable now. Again, in conjunction with the popularity of Slingerland, Slingerland rolling bomber, White Marine Pearl, which is the most desirable World War II era drums. Then there comes the Dukoe Endor, and Dukoe, there's a little discrepancy about whether Dukoe was dual color or it was the brand of paint that was used. That's, there's two schools that go with that. That was the next popularity. And then came the other drum companies. Now, the other drum companies, such as Leedy and Ludwig, they did not make double side tune drums. They predominantly had tack head bottoms, where Slingerland did both. They had tack bottoms, but they had double side tunables, which already in itself is, gives much more availability to tuning. The bottom, the casks, skinheads, and dealing with the humidity, et cetera, et cetera. It's more progressive, I'm sure, than in that era, and people are like, well, I don't wanna have this old. If things are changing, why buy the old style of the tack head bottoms? Yeah, yes, and if I'm gonna pay for something. And again, with any era, you have your different qualities and knowledgeable drummers, where I've had even today where drummers don't even realize the importance of tuning the bottom heads. So back then too, they would have just been like, well, yeah, I'm just playing in a VFW hall and, you know, could do boom, boom, boom, great. They sound fine to me. Then you have the drummer that's more finite and understands more acoustics and the importance of being able to control the bottom head. So therefore they would avoid the drum companies that don't offer that. So the collectability factor starts at Slingolin, white marine pearl, of course, the elusive black diamond pearl, which they did not make half as many as they did the white marine pearl. Then of course goes into the single color duco, which was white lacquer or the actual duco of blue and silver, black and gold, are absolutely the most desirable. Then comes Ludwig and Ludwig, then the leady dreadnoughts. Now I have to say the leady dreadnoughts really visually are more than the Ludwig and Ludwigs because of the curved deco looking lugs and also their rims being able to have the inlays around the hoops is already got a visual one upence, if you will, on Ludwig and Ludwig who did not offer that. Their lugs just looked like little round, kind of little party hot dogs and they had those cool curved over routed top hoops but they didn't offer that. So from a visual standpoint, leady dreadnoughts I guess would be the next and then Ludwig and Ludwig and of course then Gretch, they were like pretty low on the pole, if any. And then there was WFL who actually was Ludwig himself but because when he sold the rights over to Khan he couldn't even use his last name, hence WFL. He had something quite interesting where he teamed up with Cecil Stroop. Cecil Stroop was an engineer more than he was a drummer and aware of the importance of acoustics and his whole idea and concept was to tune a drum without a drum key and with basically two knobs or one or as little as possible. So Ludwig and Cecil Stroop thought that they were going to capitalize upon this L37 governmental ruling and create an entirely new way to tune a drum and to put the drum manufacturing and design on its ear. And when they created their drums, the heads were affixed to the shell via wood screws, regular hoops if you will, normal hoops. And then they used a series of bows of wood on the inside of the drum that had a tension rod that ran through a washer with a press weld in the center and the bearing edges were floating rings with a slot in them. And the tension rods were in the center of the shell. And when you tighten the rod, it pulled in on the center of the bow and it pushed the edges up and down, which tuned the drum now. This was an awesome concept until they started to fail miserably. One, of course, the acoustics was completely interrupted because of all these bows of woods and things on the insides of the shell. Secondly, they didn't thread the rods all the way up. They only threaded them three quarters of the way. So even with military parade drums, when you're again dealing with calfskin, you get outside, it's a little humid. These drummers would start tightening these bows. They would get to the end of the threads. And of course, not having a clue of what's going on. They would force it and they would snap the press weld. That means now the rod is stuck in with the threaded little press weld and it's spinning now in the center of the big washer that's connected to the bow. That renders the entire drum non-tunable and useless. Wow, that's amazing. Wow. So what happened is they had a contract with the United States Army and then when these things started to fail miserably and just sonically they could not compete with the other drum companies, they completely abandoned this entire design and went with a design that was more conventional and very similar to the rolling bombers only using walnut and all of their lugs were offset. Now, one of the anomalies of what I had just explained to you is in the Ludwig book, they state the victorious with this Cecil Strupp internal design, they state that as the second version and state then the conventional version as first where in my mind, and I've had extensive conversations with Mark Cooper about this and others, no one has any information dead on information including bill three, he says, no, he doesn't really know about it on which one came first. So in my mind, my theory is the Cecil Strupp version was first, it was a disaster, it failed and in order to keep a drum company alive, he abandoned it and went to the second version which was much more conventional and much more reliable and foolproof. Yeah, that would seem like the obvious series of events of doing the wild tuning system first and saying, okay, we tried it, this didn't work. It's, and I think everyone has that experience where you thread something and it goes too far and you push a little too hard and you pop it and then you just start spinning. So dialing it back and then going to a more conventional method. It's safe to say that in this time they are having enormous, it's very progressive. Like it's obviously a time where you have to dial back and you're using wooden lugs and wooden parts but it seems like a lot is changing and a lot is evolving in this time of World War II. So it sounds bad but we talked about it on the phone when we spoke last week about this horrible war and this time really pushed forward the evolution of the drum set and took it to a new place. If, you know, there's a majority of the time, I mean, I have stuff that I do play. I have stuff that's predominantly on display so that what you're hearing right now is if you roll up on my booth and any one of the drum shows, I will have this conversation with whoever exactly what we're talking about. And man, after I set the booth up and I get it all set up, and I do this four times a year at each of the four drum shows, I then turn and I look at it altogether collectively. And each time it just is, I look at it and go, oh my God, this stuff is incredible. And when people roll up, and I'm not saying this to blow my own horn or, you know, because it's not about me, it's about the instruments, this is why I do this. And people roll up and when they see it all together and all the different companies, they kind of just stare at it and go, this is fascinating, what's happening here? And I'm like, come on in, let's swim, man. The water's fine. And as a result of this incredible conflict and just amazingly awful atrocities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it spawned a very small time period of some of the most beautiful and innovative percussion instruments ever. Are they worth big money? Sling on, as we spoke earlier, sling on rolling bombers, yeah. The rest of them, because people just don't understand them, you know, they will appreciate it beyond belief, but a very small margin of people will actually desire to own them. And then an even smaller group of people are the idiots like myself who wish to collect, repair, and restore them. Well, anything is worth, it's worth what someone will pay for it. You know what I mean? Where if I see this, I've been blown away by it and I wanna know about it and albeit, I probably can't swing, you know, buying a rolling bomber kit right now, but it's just unbelievable. And I truly think with the war across the board, there's probably a laundry list of innovations from rockets to automobiles to all this stuff that just got pushed forward and created in this time of, in the war time. Man, you know, we have to come to grips and reality on this. The reason why we were able to get to the moon was because of German rocket technology. Exactly. Hands down. Yeah. Without even getting into the major details of that and et cetera, that's it in a nutshell, man, is that they, by the end of the war, they had jets and, you know, the U2 and they were dealing with, I mean, the V2 rockets. And then after the war, we just grabbed those engineers and before you know it, we're on the moon. So as awful as that time period was, it showed the resiliency and creativity of this country at that time and the brotherhood and camaraderie to come together as a country, lockstep arm in arm from, as you said, the kid pulling the wagon with the scrap metal to the war bonds to the soldiers that were in the two theaters, to every company just putting forth the effort was just incredible. And these drums also amidst their own construction and beauty and such are a huge representation of that, which I tell, I kind of end my little spiel with it of the importance of that and here because of that, these incredible instruments respond and once the war was over, the drum companies were like, oh my God, thank God. And we're just throwing the stuff in the back and burning it up going, thank God, let's get back to metal. And it will never, ever, ever be recreated. It'll never happen like that again. No, and that's an interesting thought because obviously we've been, the country has been in some form of a war for almost two decades now and it's not that generation anymore where there's a massive metal, people rationing and all that stuff, but while we're on the topic of the slightly unpopular topic of the contributions of Germany and all this stuff, I think one of the coolest things, and I saw a video online of you running through your setup is, and we talked about it, is your, I think you have two of them, your Hitler Youth snare drums. I mean, obviously it's just a crazy snapshot of history to have these, to have these instruments. Well, you know, when I started to do the collection which I continue to do is my idea is okay, I'm known and I have established myself for whatever that means as the World War II guy. And so you have to figure that I am dealing with a very short period of time in the scheme of vintage drums spanning from the 20s to now digging into the early 80s now, I'm dealing with 1942 to 1945. Well, you know, that little blip frozen in time means my existence can be frozen in time to the person who let's say the guy who goes to every Connecticut drum show. So in order to continue to evolve within this time period, I went, well, you know, okay, Americans, World War II, all right, we get that. Well, you know, and as I was searching around, I came, wow, this is interesting. So I make a long story short, I went and I got Hitler Youth drum, then I got another one that was a different color. And in order to get an actual adult SS soldier, black and white sonar made snare drum, the price was ridiculous. And I went, well, you know, I gotta kind of draw the line here on what my representation is gonna be. Because again, to the general public, whether I have a Hitler Youth drum or I have an actual sonar adult SS snare that was, you know, a couple of thousand bucks as opposed to a couple of hundred is it gonna make a difference? So, you know, I'm gonna draw the line. So I got two of them, which also included the Adler Hanger, which is the Eagle Hanger that the Hitler Youth, the belt went through the hanger and it was this beautiful brass eagle that had two big hooks that hooked into the drum and the drum had this little primitive wire leg rest. So I was able to get those. I was able to also get a, it's called a frog that goes around the body that holds the drumsticks. Now, the sonar drums of the era, their logo and or their badge that was stamped into the brass shell was a triangle back in that era. And what they did was is they also used triangular headed bolts. I mean, in this period they weren't rods, they were bolts, man. And on the drumsticks, the back of the drumsticks had brass ends and the rear tip of the stick was triangular shaped indentation so that you could tune the drum right from the drumstick. That I love. I mean, that is technology. Incredible. Yeah. Well, that's that German innovation, man. You know, they were thinking about it and making it happen. Now, there are plenty of others that have just the square bolt tuning bolts and the back of the sticks, again, or the brass ends and their square in the back. So you just put it over and man, just tighten the drum right there, no key required. So I was a little apprehensive about kind of going that far because I mean, let's face it. Anything that has to do with anything Nazi just represents negativity. But I said, man, if it wasn't for the Nazi existence and conflict, none of these incredible instruments behind me would even exist. So I brought them to one show and I was completely flabbergasted on how popular they were. And it was even a couple of guys like, oh yeah, man, I used to collect these. I was like, what? And other guys were like, what's going on here? And when I would tell them, they were amazed at it. So I then, continuing to evolve, I was able to research and I tried to get as many of the affected countries which are many. I was able to get a French-style drum. I was able to get a Bulgarian of course, I got a British parade drum which is the only rope drum that I have. I have to draw the line because when I started to get delve into the European percussion instruments, drums, they did not specifically make drums for the World War II conflict. All of the drums that they made in all of these countries were brought, were carryovers from World War I. You know, the 1919. Yeah, so they're using old stuff. Yes, and or they were manufacturing the exact same replicas, if you would call them replicas, of those drums and just carried them right over which then started to send me back even earlier now into World War I. I was like, oh my goodness. But it was quite amazing because I wanted to not only just have American and the German, but the French, the Bulgarian, the British, as well as American parade drums just to kind of spread it around. I have a fascist Italian also rope drum and a Prussian-style drum as well. And that coupled with the British, if I'm gonna be the World War II guy, you know, let's kind of spread it around. So I did that for a couple of years and had those displays and found that people were, again, really interested in it because my thing was on any side of a conflict, you have a drummer in a parade situation who believes in their cause, but they're doing the same thing. Yeah, exactly. They just happen to be on opposite ends of the spectrum and in one point would absolutely not be able to coexist, but from a percussive musical standpoint, they would absolutely be brothers. Yeah, we're all musicians. And I think on that note of just, it's obviously a controversial thing to have these, but you need to see, it's really interesting to see a Sonar SS snare drum. Obviously it's thousands of dollars, but that just, it's something about World War II and the Nazi party and all this is just fascinating. It doesn't make you a Nazi to be interested in the equipment. It's just a snapshot of time and to think of some kid walking around with this drum in the 40s believing that his side is the right side and you're right, we're just all musicians. So what the hell, what do you do, you know? Yeah, and that's the reason why I also brought that out and when I would say that to people too, where it would be like it's such a dichotomy of they are our enemy, but that kid and if I was a kid at that point and parading for my local VFW, we're doing the exact same thing thousands of miles apart for the same cause, for the same love of being a drummer. It was just wonderful, you know? Yeah, and now you give people the opportunity just to see that and that's a perfect segue to let people know where they can find you. How can people find you and see your unbelievable collection? You've mentioned the drum shows, but can they find you online or what's the best way to get in touch with you? Through the Facebook page, Joey Boom, also Instagram, the website of joeyboom.com. Awesome, so you're a busy man. It's important to note that you are running the Delaware Drum Show, so I think anyone out there doing the circuit of drum shows are just looking for something fun to do and you live in that area, either Delaware, Connecticut or Chicago or any of them. You're a very interesting and unique booth. You are a cool guy and I would love to, I need to check it out myself, so it's been a pleasure talking with you today and I hope we inspired some people to research World War II era drums and just check them out because they are unbelievable and really the fact that they're so unknown is just a, it's cool that you can come across things in the world of drums to this day and just be amazed at the evolution over time. Absolutely and please, those of you guys who are girls listening to this and go to the drum shows, come and seek it out and it's one thing to hear inscription, see pictures on the line, but to be able to come and see them firsthand and see them all together is something completely different and to continue on with the evolution of it, I have started to go what I call new old school and I am gathering parts and World War II drums and refinishing them in exotic veneers but making a majority of them double-sided tunable so that they are brand new, completely playable, but 98% original parts to just push this very small period of time and these special manufactured drums with predominantly wood parts into the future so that they can be playable and they can be exotic and be viable instruments to compete with any of the custom drum companies that are out there today. So when you come to visit the booths at the drum shows, you'll see the restored, some are completely original, I was lucky enough to be the second owner of some of these drums, others I had to completely restore from the ground up back to factory and actually create wood parts on a lathe and build missing parts, but we'll also have then these recreated original old new school drums that look incredible and are absolutely playable and just sound like nothing else out there. So it's my plan to continue to do that to the years and beyond. Yeah, I mean, honestly I see it as a market where now there's copper drums, there's fiberglass, there's all this kind of stuff out there that are unique little corners and pockets of the drum world. I think it would be awesome to have newly put together drum sets like this that have the wooden components. I mean, there's every niche in the world out there for drums so I why not have this one and you're the guy, you're the guy to do it. Well, absolutely and I don't know what's driving me to that direction. I've always been a slave to my own creativity and I just kind of happily go where it guides me and I get these ideas and then I kind of do a little bit and I throw it out to people who I respect their opinion and I get feedback on it and if anything it's going to offer something different that is gonna be creative, it's gonna be beautiful, it's gonna be original, it's gonna be vintage and it is gonna be complete homage and celebration of the wood era of 1942 to 1945. And people can play them and that's the kicker of the whole thing is you can actually play them today and not feel like you're gonna break this thing and have it fall apart. So if you're looking for one of these then Joe Mechler, Joey Boom is the man to talk to. Joe, I can't tell you how happy I am to have had you on the podcast today and I learned a lot. Every time I talk to you, I learn something new, man. Well, I have to tell you, I really appreciate what you're doing and man, just look forward to one day meeting you and dropping as many names to you as possible to help continue the success of this podcast. Well, that is amazing. I appreciate the kind words and like you said, it's one person is leading to another person is leading to another person. I just, I'm hoping to get Bill Dedimore, Dedimore from Pork Pie in soon on one of the next ones talking about how he's building the new Rogers drum. So that's something that people listen to this can be excited about, but I appreciate it, man. We're a community and we got a, I am new to the vintage world and that's why I'm doing this podcast is to learn and to have people learn with me. So from experts such as yourself. So Joe, I won't take up any more of your time, man. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it and I will see you at the drum shows. Excellent. I appreciate it, Bart, very much and look forward to meeting you by the end of the day. Big thank you to Joey Boom for talking with me today. Be sure to find them online and check them out at all the drum shows around the US. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at Drum History and please share, rate and leave a review. And let me know any topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.