Not all kits are suitable for refinishing in this method. If the kit has been previously finished or has a woodgrain appearance already then you can pretty much rule out refinishing them. Unless you want to sand back to bare grain its just not worth it. The outer ply of the drum must be made of natural wood. If you take the heads off your drums or have clear heads then you can see inside the drum. If the inside has wood finish then the chances are the outer ply will be wood also.
For reference the drum kit I own is a very cheap starter kit. I bought it second hand for $200AUS. The heads were dented and the hats were literally brown and corrugated (and not like soundedge hats). I replaced the heads and the cymbals. Unfortunately the replacements are Paiste 302s. My budget doesn't really allow for anything better at this stage. The drums themselves had warped wraps when I got them - especially on the bassdrum. It become evident later that this was from sun exposure.
The wood in these cheap drumkits is questionable. It sounds reasonably decent with good tuning but in terms of refinishing it can be a pain in the ass. The wood on my kit flakes easily no matter how careful you are - but I believe this is also partly due to slight mistreatmeant by the previous owner. The wood on the mid tom was quite terrible as you will see later on in the pictures. However the wood on the floor tom and high tom was quite good - besides the flaking. You can normally tell the quality of the wood and the kit by how the holes are drilled. If they are all flaked up then either the wood is poor or the drilling was rushed.
Once you decide you want to proceed with this guide you must first remove all the hardware - this means all the rims and lugs aswell as the tom mounting system. You must be left with a naked shell (with wrap) at the end of this step. First start by using your drum key to remove the rims. Do this to both sides until you have the rims and heads removed on both sides. Store the rims and heads away somewhere and make sure you don't lose the lugs or the washers - place them in a plastic bag - you don't want to lose them.
With the heads and lugs removed we can now proceed to remove the tom mounting system and the lug mounts. Use your phillips head screwdriver to remove the screws on the inside that correspond to the lug mounts on the outside. If your drum uses a different attachment system (flathead or torx screws) then you will need to use a different screwdriver. With the screws removed the lug mounts should just fall off. To make things easier its best to do this with a head on the bottom to catch the screws as they drop - then when you've done all the lugmounts on one side you can just collect them and place them in the bag (see middle picture below).
Do this to both sides to remove all the lug mounts - place them all in the bag along with the screws and lugs. All that should be left is the mounting system - whether its some kind of bass drum mounting system, rack system or leg suspension the idea should be the same. Simply remove the bolts. The bolts on my suspension system have screw tops and I think you'll find most drums have them. So simply hold the nut at the back with pliers and use your screwdriver to undo the bolts. When they are all removed put the nuts and washers back on the bolts and add them to your bag of goodies.
With all that done the only thing left to do is to remove the grommet around any vents the drum may have. Do this by getting a knife and sliding it under the grommet. It will take a little bit of working but you'll get it under the grommet eventually. You will then be able to pry the sides of the grommet up a little bit. You can then get a pair of pliers (I used wire cutters because I lost my pliers) and pull every side of it up. You can then push it through the vent and then discard it. Also remove any logos that are held on with screws. Also shown is the bag of goodies and how the shell should look after your all done with hardware removal.
After all the hardware removal is done you must remove the wraps themselves. This is probably the 'do or die' step in this whole procedure. Once you remove the wraps its near impossible to put them back on properly - and you must also take care when removing as to not rip off some of the shell with the glue.
Start by finding the seam where the wrap overlays. You must then heat this seem with a hairdryer/heatgun and use a knife to start to loosen it off. Slip the knife in under the seem as shown in the pictures. You can then start to use your fingers (if its not too hot) to loosen it off a bit. At this stage the procedure is still entirely reversable - so you can use this to check the quality of the wood underneath. If you decide its good you can continue - if you don't like it you can glue the wrap down a little bit and put the hardware back on. When you are pulling the wrap off be very careful to take your time and make sure the glue is heated sufficiently otherwise there is a chance that you will pull the wood off - as Ill show in some later pictures. The wrap should start to come off with quite minimal effort if heated sufficiently.
The first part to remove is the glue along the overlap of the wraps. just keep heating and pull it up until the whole thing is removed. If you are very lucky there won't be any glue holding the rest of the wrap on - and the wrap will now fall off and you'll have a nice bare shell. Unfortunately for me - the makers of this drumkit weren't cheap enough in the glue department for my liking - and decided to do the whole shell. The rest of this process is quite routinely straightforward. Just keep heating and pulling the wrap. In the bottom left corner of the third picture you can see one of the downsides to having cheap wood - you get this mild splintering. You just sand this out later but it does make it quite annoying. Again make sure you take your time to avoid major splintering.
You may choose to cut the wrap after every 1/4 of the drum removed - as it can be quite a hinderance to have half a metre of hard plastic in the way. Just cut if off with normal scissors and toss it - making sure to leave enough to hang onto to continue removal. In the following pictures I'm showing my heating technique and the final part of the removal of the wraps. You can probably see in some of these pictures the very low quality of the wood - the high and floor tom had significantly better wood than the midtom I'm showing you now. The mid tom has 'termite trails' and different types of wood on the top. While not a problem it did make for some shoddy looking pictures. When finished though it looked quite attractive.
You can see the floor tom in the third picture. Once you've done all this and are happy with it move outside to prepare for sanding/glue removal.
©Daniel Wright 2004