Description

All hand turned on my 17th century reproduction Joseph Moson lathe and using tools and techniques of the early modern period. Wood type is beech. The period print is from 1595 and is the clearest I’ve been able to find. Earlier and later drum stick pictures and prints (1550’s to 1650’s) seem the same but are not so easy to make out. In the picture showing the print on my shirt, I am using the sticks I coped from that picture, not the ones I make here that are copied from an original extant stick. There is only one original stick extant from the 1640’s and they are the ones I provide, faithfully copied, here.

Recently a customer in Holland sent me a picture of a drumstick in the archive of a museum. He kindly included all the dimensions. It may never have been on display anywhere. A ship called the Nova Zembla was frozen in ice in the 1640’s. Some of the crew survived by living in a hut, made and heated by bits of the ice grounded ship. Centuries later the site of the hut was found and there was a drumstick, preserved for all time. Now I can copy it and two people have tested it. So far, one thing I know for sure is that they are too heavy for a modern drum. Here are some pics of the ones I make. They are bigger, longer and heavier than normal and they are thick where you hold them in the middle. The first pic is of me cutting the blanks out from a beech plank. One shows the new sticks compared to one of the previous ones I’ve made. The other shows two sticks I’ve made, above and below an actual sized pic of the original (mine looks bigger but that is just because they are not flat on the page and the bottom one still has the turning nibs on) which was also made of beech!