16" Bass Drum & Drum Set Coffee Table
I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn’t have any drums.
-Stevie Ray Vaughan
The 16" Bass Drum #
While putting together an acoustic Drum Set with the choicest parts, I bought a set of used Toms consisting of 10" and 14" rack toms, and a 16" floor tom. In order to save some money and space, I decided to convert the floor tom into a 16" bass drum and label the setup - My Jungle Kit. This way the entire kit would fit comfortably in my car and I wouldn’t have to lug around an unwieldy 22" Bass Drum.
So I set out scanning the forums to figure out how to convert a Floor Tom into a Bass Drum. The seemingly best way to do this was to use a Pearl Jungle Kit Adapter. It wasn’t cheap, but it worked out pretty well.
Bill of Materials to Convert a Floor Tom into a Bass Drum #
- Pearl JG-16 Jungle Gig Adapter -
$30 - Pearl IS1216SL/C - Make sure your hoop size fits this mount. My Mapex ProM 16" FloorTom has a 2.3mm hoop, and it works with the IS1216SL/C -
$28 - Aquarian Superkick II 16" Bass Drum Head, or any other head 16" bass drum head -
$40
… and with everything put together, it looks like this
16" Bass Drum played Live #
When we, Metal Etch, played our very first gig with this new drum setup, we realized the 16" bass drum just wasn’t cutting it without being mic’d. In the following gig we did mic it but the FloorTom-ish ring and the general tone from the 16" just didn’t feel right.
Since my band mostly covers 70s & 80s Rock n Roll, I finally succumbed to the demands of a better, thicker, fuller bass drum sound and went out and bought a used 22" Bass Drum. Now that I had gotten really comfortable with carry around the 16" for practice, I decided to keep it that way and use the 22" only for Live shows.
So far it seems to be working out pretty well, but I had to do something with this big, mostly idle, Bass Drum sitting around in my living room occupying space where there was none. There was only one way to fix the situation - use the 22" as a coffee table.
Bass Drum Coffee Table #
I scouted around the aisles of the local Lowe’s store hoping to find something that would work as a coffee table top and found the perfect fit - a 24" round piece of semi-finished wood for the table top, and a pack of wooden toy wheels that would fit into the tuning lugs and act as stands. I found this by accident and am glad I didn’t have to call, my second option, an ugly 2ft/2ft (24"-by-24") piece of unfinished square plywood my new table top.
Put together this is how it looks:
The wood is unfinished so it will need a layer of clear-coat / protective wood finish.
…. and just like that, for a price of $20, I now own a very nice artsy, bohemian, couture coffee table [I believe that’s what the kids call it these days] :).