im a practical man (yeah right).  i dont have a lot of cash and im always looking for cheap ways to do things with the kit.  i needed new spurs for my kick.  i picked up a couple gibralter bass hoop mountable cowbell posts for $9 each.  they work great and thats two less peices of hardware on my bass drum shell.  i use bamboo plant stakes for bundle sticks.  it was about $3 for a big ol' bag of stakes about 3 ft long.   i wanted a bell sound.  but something deeper and earthier than the ice bell i already had.  for $1 at a flea market i got a copper flour canister that sounds great.  i plan on getting a junk turntable for the actual table that turns.  very ringy bell sound.

what im looking for here is your ideas for cheap fixes, cheap sounds, uses for things that arent what they were designed for.  nothing like emergency gig duct taping or anything.  but stuff youve done that worked and lasted and will continue to.  like barts 5 cent cymbal rivet, or the ever present auto brake drum bell.

whatcha got?

like boiling bass strings to clean out the gunk.  nice tip.  great for that gig that happens to be two days before payday when you only have 2$ to your name

I had my bass pedal strap break on my old junk set when me and my friend were jamming so I took it over to the machine shed and with some washers and duct tape and two exhaust springs off of my cr250 dirtbike, I managed to make something work for about three minutes. It was a mess.

If you are fond of zerorings over moon gels for muffling, and you are tired of manufacturers not packaging them for single-item sale or mass vendors refusing to break up sets for you . . . make your own. It's no more difficult than cutting a hole in your resonant kick head.

You can get sheets of mylar from art or drafting supply houses in whatever mil thickness you desire. Using old heads is usually not desirable because head mylar is too thick. The challenge is finding templates to cut the correct size circles. The good news is that circles abound in your environment. Be creative.

If you temporarily glue the template to the mylar stock while cutting it prevents slippage. Also, if you have access to some kind of turntable, it facilitates a smooth turn while you're cutting with your X-acto.

Is this Norm Abrahms or Martha Stewart?  

Hey, cool thread!

As long as nobody starts suggesting easter-egg pastel kits, that is...  

hose clamps make great cheap memory locks and can be foudn to fit any size arm.

as for the weedeater cord, thats essentially a synthetic version of gut snares.  i plan on turning my fram drum into a bendir that way

howd you make the beater? come on now, this isnt just listing ideas, its sharing them for us all to use

i forgot to mention my massager beaters  ive got two "thumpers" ... they have long thin bamboo handles with a big rubber ball  (like a hollow super pinky, about 2" dia.)  on flat wooden mounts at the top.  they have a sharper attack than mallets, and just enough control to the bounce to be able to use them.  if you get 'em timed right though, you can do doubles like nobodies bizniz.  thomas lang would hate 'em

after you made the wood beater, did you use the 4 armed massager like a brush  

forgot another one i use.  i use iron cobra beater which is designed for good focused attack.  sometimes i want a big fat open sound, like an old school sheepskin beater.  so i rolled up a sock and sewed up the edge so i could just pop it on top of my beater.  viola.  

I sometimes lay a rubber doorstop on the batter head of my cocktail drum to muffle it. The guys in my band think it's some hi-tech device, not recognizing it for what it is.

I've been waiting for a reason to tell this story. Years ago I made a really interesting set if chimes. My father is an auto mechanic and use to have all kinds of spare parts lying around his shop. We found and old cam shaft and a full set of push rods from an old chevy 327 V8. We found that when struck, the push rods had a nice melodic tone, so we cut the rods in about half inch increments to get different notes and attatched them with some fishing line. We built a small rack out of wood and fit the cam shaft to the top of it and simply hung the push rods from the cam shaft with the fishing line. They were actually somewhat in tune with themselves too, pretty cool!!

when i got my set it had three cymbals but only two stands so i (having been a trumpet player at one point) used my old music stand as a third stand and it's awesome. it kept slippiong down so i used an old pair of vice grips to hold the tube up.

How do those Brooms differ from say, HotRods?

So the trick is: buy a new drum kit every time you need new Brooms - that way you'll get a good price!  

i made some mallets for suspended cymbal out of an old pair of broken sticks and an old sock.  i taped half a sock to the end of each stick, then wrapped the sock tight.  then i taped back over the end of the sock and wrapped to the bottom of the stick.

this is my favorite thread of all time

i made myself mallet sticks
i took a pair of sticks .. then took a tissue folded it longways 2x put a small piece of tape on it and wrapped it around tightly.. around the butt end, i repeated this with 3 tissues on each stick, then i taped off the end and then put a square piece of some form of clothlike substance over it and rubberbanded it in place

   amazingly it works great

another thing i did  was take 10 pairs of wood tip power pro sticks and dip the tips into polyurethane laquer to make them into plastic tips sounding sticks... these also work great,... i like them better than regular nylon tips because i end up breaking the nylon tips off making the otherwise still perfect stick useless

-- If you play a song with a lot of cross-sticking and toms (as in, say, a jazz samba or "The Weekend"..ahem), it's a bit of a trick to come back with the cross-stick just right and avoid a "kerfizz-CLunK!" by hitting the drumhead a bit too hard with the end of the stick.  I made the inadvertent discovery last night that a piece of felt masking-taped where the end of the stick comes to rest erases any tell-tale drumhead/snare noise, allowing for a looser performance.  Snare resonance is sure to be comprimised by this method, and priorities should be established as far as backbeat/cross-stick ratio, etc.  It can be removed and replaced easily as well.

-- O-rings (donuts to you?) are a good method of achieving a full, dampened sound from your drums.  Making your own O-rings from spent drumheads is a good cheap method to achieve this.  However, O-rings from top heads can dampen a bit more than you may like.  I use an O-ring (for my snare) cut from a spent snare side head.  It's a much more fuller sound with all the right overtones cut out.

-- You can make your own dual purpose drumsticks in this fashion:  Simply tape a knob with 1/2" (or so)medical tape (I like a 1/2" thick knob) on the butt-end of the stick, cut a square of felt to size, rubber band it around the bottom and tape the bottom of the felt to the stick, leaving the felt striking surface  exposed.  Two layers of felt might be used for strength.