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Vintage Drum Tension Rod Threads

In my original THREAD Talk post, I discussed the most common thread counts and diameters for wing nuts and bolts on drums and hardware. This post will cover another key component of vintage drums, tension rods.

This article will cover five of the most common thread counts on drum tension rods from before about 1980. I won’t be dealing with modern-only thread counts, such as DW’s True Pitch rods.

12-24: Standard US Tension Rod Thread

The 12-24 thread has long been the common standard among US makers, used at least as far back as the 1920s and possibly earlier. It was eventually adopted by nearly every drum manufacturer and is now the global standard.

This thread is the reason you can mix different brands of tension rods on almost any drum set.

10-24: Leedy/Walberg & Auge Skinny Rods

The thinner 10-24 standard is now long lost to history but was the thread used by Leedy, famously the largest drum maker in the world at one time.

Leedy made a lot of drums that used single tension thumb rods like the one pictured above (and/or used rods made by the Walberg & Auge company). Most of these were 10-24 thread. Many of their slot head dual tension rods were also 10-24. These are especially difficult to track down today, forcing some to used hex head bolts from the hardware store to play their vintage drums.

Common in the 1920s and 30s, this thread probably started to fade away around the 40s as the Leedy company was sold and restructured multiple times and as dual tension drums became the norm. Chrome examples are somewhat rare.

1/4-20: Sonor and Japanese Makers

The 1/4-20 thread that appeared on the majority of vintage wing nuts and bolts was also used by some Japanese drum makers for bass drum tension rods.

Sonor has long used 1/4-20 tension rods for some of their lines made in Germany, and continues to currently.

6mm-1.00: Common MIJ Bass Drum Thread

Though some Japanese makers used 1/4-20, 6mm was the more common standard of the era for bass drums.

Use of this thread continued among Japanese and Taiwanese makers throughout the 70s and possibly later. It lives on today as a common standard for wing nuts and bolts on drum hardware, but is no longer used for tension rods as far as I can tell.

6mm  is one to watch out for when swapping lug inserts, as a 12-24 tension rod will fit into it and may appear to catch correctly until under significant tension.

5mm-.9: the Undersized Japanese Thread

For snares and toms, Japanese drum makers of the 50s through the 70s utilized both the US 12-24 thread and the smaller 5mm one. Use of this thread probably ended around the time that import drum manufacturing began to spread from Japan to Taiwan.

Other Threads

There are other thread counts that were used in Europe on brands such as Meazzi and Trixon, which I consider obscure enough to exclude here. Those may be covered in a future addendum if I can track down some good specimens.

Any contributions or corrections are welcomed! Please get at me through my contact page.