New Skins Advice Needed... - How far down to pull 'em!?

[tactikal]

I'm getting some new skins for my conga+quinto and everything except one part is clear... the drying;

How far down to pull the skin when it is wet?
-just enough to secure the lug?

How tight should the lugs be at first?
-as loose as possible?

Should I be careful not to make it too tight when the skin is wet as the shrinking+drying might crack the wood?

[Mike]

Should I be careful not to make it too tight when the skin is wet as the shrinking+drying might crack the wood?

YES! YES!

How tight should the lugs be at first?
-as loose as possible?

They should have some turns to gain stability, but you should carefully turn them by hand and possibly half a turn or so with a wrench and then STOP.

How far down to pull the skin when it is wet?
-just enough to secure the lug?

Yes again, not too low, the head will eventually stretch over time anyway, but depending on the type of skin this will take some time. So you can pull the wet skin appr. 1/2 up to 1 inch down.

Good luck!
BTW which type of skin do you mount?

[tactikal]

Thanks for that Mike...

I'm going to have to use Heifer - 3mm thick - the only kind I can get easily ... without killing it myself :;):

I tried;

mule (can't find it here)
kangaroo (too thin ~1mm)
camel (too thick 5-6mm)
bull and steer is easier to get as a whole skin - but none of it is prepared
So it would still take weeks for me to prepare the hide, remove the hair, dry it and then fit it... etc.

We have very strict quarantine laws.. so any skins I import from overseas will have to be treated and irradiated on entry.
A fellow in Sydney said that a set of muleskins from Isaac got ruined by the quarantine-treatment (they spray it with something quite bad).

There may be a way to not use any sprays and still protect the quarantine laws... but it takes many weeks and I want new skins soon
- You keep the skins in the freezer at -4degrees for a few weeks and this will kill anything in the skin... maybe I'll get Isaac to keep some of his mules on ice for delivery in a few months.

I would also have to check with the quarantine officers about doing that.

So tomorrow I'm going to look at these prepared drum-skins and if they're not suitable.. then i'll have to get a whole hide and do it myself.

The other option I thought about was maybe llama or alpaca.. they have thinner skin than a camel.. but with good tensile strength.
We have lots of those over here.

Wish me luck.



Edited By tactikal on 1191250270

[jorge]

The important question is not so much how far to pull it down once it is mounted, but rather how far down to mount it. Mounting with the rim a half inch below the top of the skin should work fine, an inch may be too low. Several times I have mounted skins about an inch down and after a few years it is an inch and a quarter or more, causing the flesh hoop below the rim and the inside of the skin to be too close and touch the surface of the drum. This all depends on the geometry of the drum, rim, and skin, but be careful not to mount it too low. You can adjust how high or low it is while you are mounting the wet skin by carefully pushing the edge of the skin down or pulling it up with pliers, making sure it is symmetric around the rim. Once you mount it, only tighten it very slightly, preferably by hand turning the tuning nuts. After a day or so drying time, you can tighten it VERY slightly more with a wrench, but only a quarter of a turn or so. Remember that the invisible part of the skin between the drum and the folded back edge of the skin inside the rim is the highest tension area and also the last part to dry thoroughly. Depending on humidity and other factors, it may take a week or more for that part to dry completely.

By the way, freezing at -4 degrees C will not reliably kill anthrax spores. Anthrax is one of the main organisms driving quarantine laws. Contamination of skins with anthrax is very very rare, but does happen. Recently a drummer/drum artisan in NYC nearly died from inhalation anthrax he apparently got from goatskins he brought back from his native Ivory Coast. I and several other drummers I know have played some of the skins he had brought back, nobody else got anthrax. His was the first documented case of inhalation anthrax in a drummer or drum artisan since 1965 when those statistics started being systematically recorded, but that one case has caused much more widespread enforcement of (already existing) importation quarantine laws for animal hides. Cutaneous anthrax is only slightly more common, and is generally not fatal, whereas inhalation anthrax is fatal in about 75% of diagnosed cases.

Some of these quarantine laws are evidence based, but some procedures, like the -4 degree C freezing (if it is really written into the Australian law, which I doubt), do not reflect current scientific knowledge. Skins with the hair removed and no evidence of a sore or ulceration on the skin are extraordinarily unlikely to be contaminated with anthrax.



Edited By jorge on 1191262055

[akdom]

Hi

you already have good help here...

just make sure the skins are completely dry... I usually wait about a week just to be sure.

and I tighten the skins pretty 'high'.. not me, the skins lol.
the top rim should be flush with the skin.. it will go down slowly..

I changed my skins about 2 months ago, the top rim was flush and now it is about half inch below the skin.. just perfect.

B

[tactikal]

hmm, I hadn't thought about whether the hoop would get low enough to get jammed on the drum.
Thanks!

As it stands they tune up quite low (they were kept tuned-up the whole time by the previous owner) so they currently sit almost 2inches down from the bearing-edge.

As for the Aussie quarantine restrictions.. the keeping 'em in the freezer bit is not official/standard practice.. it was something a customs official mentioned to someone about some assorted rawhide bits he brought in.

I think it may have been more about killing possible parasites, etc.. than Anthrax prevention.
The standard procedure is to gamma-irradiate the skins and spray them with some harsh chemical (which apparently ruins skins for drumming).

As for the mounting.. I'll have to see how far these lugs can go...otherwise it's MacGuyver time. :laugh:

Thanks for all the advice guys - always appreciated.

[Mike]

Tactikal,
interesting to read about wildlife and pest control down under anyway :;): As to the heifer: poor thing Cattle is fine for congas, of course.
It´s really a pity that Isaac´s mule skins are treated like the latest terror attack device by customs authorities :angry:

So good luck and let us know about your successful mounting process!

[buckoh]

Hey everyone, here's an interesting newspaper article regarding the djembe player and anthrax. I used to live in this town (Connecticut) and will be up there playing an annual Halloween party soon! Buck

Sep 28 2007 10:15 AM
Workers to assess anthrax property
Crews to determine contaminants' disposal

By Robert Miller
Staff Writer

DANBURY -- People driving by an anthrax-contaminated home on Padanaram Road may see people working there over the next few weeks.

The good news is people will be driving by.

For the moment, at least, the cleanup of the site will go into a minor key mode that won't involve routing traffic away from the house.

"The road won't be closed down," Michael Nalipinski, the on-site coordinator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday.

Instead, Nalipinski said, crews will be on the scene on and off over the next few weeks to do some basic cleanup tasks. They'll take samples from a barn behind the house to make sure it's free of anthrax spores. The spores act like seeds, storing active anthrax bacteria inside. They can exist in a dormant state in the environment for years.

Crews will also be trying to figure out how to best dispose of the waste materials the previous work generated. That waste includes used decontamination suits and the chlorine-based solution used to wash the spores off walls and household objects. All that material is now stored in barrels at the site.

Nalipinski said Thursday the EPA and its partners in the cleanup -- the city and the state Department of Public Health and Department of Environmental Protection -- still haven't set a time line for cleaning the spores out of the house on the site. But he said the EPA's first choice for the work still remains fumigation -- building a big tent around the entire house, then pumping a gas into it that will kill all the spores.
Mayor Boughton

The house and barn and the trunk of a car became contaminated with anthrax spores in August when a musician and African drum-maker purchased goat skins in New York City to fashion into drum heads. Unbeknownst to him, the skins, which came from West Africa, were infected with anthrax spores.

Health officials learned of the situation early in September when the drum-maker and a family member came down with cutaneous anthrax -- a form of the disease that occurs when the spores get under the skin and the bacteria come alive. That caused a nickel-size, black-scabbed sore to break out on the man's arm, which doctors diagnosed as anthrax.

The disease is not contagious and the two patients are successfully being treated with antibiotics to kill the infection. Health officials have repeatedly told people not to panic about the contamination, which, they insist, represents no risk to the public.

Health officials have not released the name of the man or his family member. But drum-maker and musician Ase-AmenRa Kariamu lives at the home with his family.

As soon at health officials learned of the anthrax contamination there, the Kariamu family had to vacate and health officials sealed the home off from the public. The investigation of the contamination and the first phase of the cleanup closed a section Padanaram Road for six days and cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[jorge]

Thanks for that newsclip, Buck, it is hot off the press and hasn't hit the medical / public health literature yet.

Cutaneous anthrax from animal hides does happen but is extremely rare. According to the CDC there have been 158 cases of anthrax reported from animal skins in the US between 1955 -1999, of which most were cutaneous and 10 were inhalation. One of the cutaneous cases was associated with a goat skin drum purchased in Haiti, the rest were from industrial processing of hides and hair (eg, cashmere). The one case of inhalation anthrax in NYC in 2006 was the first and only case of inhalation anthrax ever reported in a drum artisan or drummer in the US. The 2 cases last month of cutaneous anthrax in a drum artisan makes a total of 3 reported cases in the US since 1955. Getting cutaneous anthrax from djembe skins is vanishingly rare, getting inhalation anthrax from djembe skins is even more rare. There has never been a reported case of anthrax associated with conga or bongo skins. To put these numbers in perspective, from 1980-1995 there were 1380 deaths in the US due to being struck by lightning.

Bottom line: play your djembe, don't worry about anthrax, but don't play it in open spaces outdoors during thunderstorms.



Edited By jorge on 1191465847

[Isaac]

The Antracis case involved The Djembe maker & drum builder in NYC - he is Vado Diomande.
I know Vado from his many visits to JCR Percussion where he gets steel rings made to size.
Vado recalled inhaling the moldy fungal
powder on a thick furry cow skin ( not goat as reported ) he was about to mount it onto a djunjun drum ( or Donoum),
not a goatskin for a djembe. The skin he recalled picking up damp off the round where it had been
lying developing the anthracis spores( not full blown Lab anthrax like someone sent in envelopes to DC)
- he had just brought it back from his trip back from his homeland - Ivory Coast, Africa.

As soon as he inhaled it he got ill right away and knew to check himself into the hospital
right away. Unfortunately, the authorities could take no chances and had to destroy
all the other skins and drums in his studio... He was in the hospital for a few weeks - almost 2 years ago.
He's back in full health drumming , teaching classes,
and doing great custom mounting of djembes and the the other Dounoum support drums.
He runs his own Dance troupe called The Kotchegna Dance Troupe specializing in the music of Ivory Coast.
_ One of the many great master drummers we're forrtunate to have here in NYC.

http://www.ctmd.org/pages/gbbafrica.html

~ ISAAC

[Isaac]

CLARIFICATION
_ I was referring to the older story about two years ago.
ISAAC

[jorge]

Hi Isaac,

Thanks for your first hand information about the drum maker with anthrax in 2006. I do not know Vado Diomande personally, but got the personal information about him from someone who does. I would actually like to meet him, he is an amazing person, having survived inhalation anthrax, recovered completely, and gone back to drumming, stilt dancing, and his rigorous performing schedule.

Just a couple of points of information about anthrax that would be helpful for readers of this forum to know. It is transmitted to humans from hides, hair, or wool from an animal that had anthrax infection (usually cutaneous) before being slaughtered. The hides do not get infected by spores from the ground. Herbivorous animals do get infected by eating grasses and plants contaminated with spores on land that is contaminated from previous infected animals, but humans get infected from infected animals, not from the ground.

Molds/fungi are a competely different kind of organism from bacteria, and certain fungi can sometimes cause disease in humans, but fungi are unrelated to the anthrax bacteria.

Most (80%) human cases of anthrax are from goat, and while cows can get infected as well, cow hide is even much more rarely a source of human anthrax infection than goat hide, hair, or wool. I have not heard of a case of muleskin being contaminated, but I guess it is theoretically possible.

In Vado Diomande's case, his noticing that the cowhide was moldy does not mean that he got infected from that cowhide. While the incubation period can rarely be as short as a day, it is usually about a week, and people generally don't perceive the exposure to the spores. He probably perceived the odor of mold or mildew, and associated that with the infection.

Bottom line for us is that anthrax transmission to humans by contaminated animal hides is so exceedingly rare that we as drummers and drum makers in the US, Europe. or Australia don't need to even think about it. Although some people believe that they are excessively restrictive, the quarantine laws reduce the risk even more. Maybe I shouldn't have even raised the topic, but I do think it is worthwhile for each of us to have scientifically accurate information since we often get second or third hand information that may be misleading, such as that keeping animal hides in the freezer for a few weeks at -4 degrees C kills all bacteria. It might kill your marriage, but it won't reliably kill all the bacteria, and it might even contaminate food with some other nasty organisms.

[tactikal]

Interesting stuff..

With regards to the freezing of hides;
That was written before I was aware that anthrax might be a reason for import restrictions.
It was in reference to a statement made by a quarantine/customs agent at an airport;
From what I remember it was in regard to the killing of parasites rather than ridding the hide of bacterial contaminants.

These parasites are considered a much larger threat than anthrax.