On drums...

Grained Maple is a nice looking veneer. My favorite of the faux.

If the toms were made after Sonor began using bauxbinga, I'll believe they were ALPI.

But since we have no good scale as to when that happened - bubinga played peekaboo for a while, apparently, and for no apparent reason...

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Gregory

This is what I mean by Sonor wood working. The horizontal scratches are sanding marks. The vertical lines are probably marks left from the veneer knives. Sonor's sanding did not attempt to remove them. I did not see that kind of marking on the rauxswood.

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Gregory

Wow, that is very coarse.
My SClassix Ebony kick has horizontal sanding lines visible at a certain angle.
I've never noticed those knife or sanding marks on any of my Link Era veneered drums. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

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Jeff
Gots ta luv da Beech
Australia

You probably haven't. I'd be interested to know what you see.

That is why I believe it would be very hard to forge a Signature drum and get it past an astute observer. Sanding both ways would not do it. You'd have to reproduce those ridges and grooves, and those lines would have to be absolutely straight and parallel.

Below, my rauxswood Classix: they had the sanding lines around the drums - that's just Sonor's way of sanding shells on a rotating spindle - but not the longitudinal marks.

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Gregory

Pic of SQ2 Scandinavian Birch



One of the shells made for me about the same time the 6" drums were made.

That SQ2 kit of yours was just incredible. The snare looks like genuine veneer. Perhaps a little less vivid an SQ.
Kinda like this

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Jeff
Gots ta luv da Beech
Australia

I agree with Jeff. All the scandi in those photographs is real.

The two snares I would vouch for before the SQ, if I was told that one was fake and death was the penalty for making the wrong choice. Getting that kind of refracted light out of engineered wood is unthinkable. You can get small bits of it from the glued up parent wood, but nothing like that hallelujah chorus. Those snares have spectacular veneers!

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Gregory

Is there any reason why the snare could not be Grained Maple?

Yes.

How wood reflects light, and why it reflects it differently depending on your relative position to the light source, is way beyond my knowledge. I just know it does. This snippet is from a study at Cornell that tries to diagnose the causes of light reflection of wood:



If you are interested, the full PDF is here http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~srm/publicat ... 5-wood.pdf

Engineered veneers are created by harvesting fast growth trees, cutting them into veneers, dying the veneers, dying glues, and pressing and gluing the veneers into a new log. Differing orientations of grain, and different applications of pressure are used strategically so that, when veneers are cut from the new log, the grain looks more diverse as exotic veneers will, swirls of color and grain emulate burls, and curved lines produce 'cathedral' effects (as in rauxswood) or a wandering figure appearance (buaxbing).

To the degree that the parent wood (poplar or soft maple) reflect light, the new veneer will too, but it will only be in very small sections and not contiguous, as the veneer on your snare is.

Grained maple is a bit of a mystery. In some photographs it looks more like a printed pattern on top of a quilted maple veneer. But notice how the pattern of 'pops' is linear. The pops in Scandi are not like that. I'd have to see Grained Maple in person to understand it. One thing about the veneer on your snare shell - there is no discernible pattern. I don't just mean no repeating pattern; the variables of ALPI production make absolute repetition unlikely. But ALPI cannot recreate the glorious complexity of that veneer.

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Gregory

Here's a copy of

Just so you don't think it was an isolated example of bubinga, here's an example of why it is hard to see the vertical lines. Once your eye becomes accustomed to seeing them, they are visible over the entire surface, and their presence creates part of the look of the veneer. The easiest place to begin to see them is just below the gap between the two lugs that are most directly facing us.

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Gregory