Force 1000 Hardware - and perspectives
This was the original Force 1000 series hardware. HSS was blowing this stuff out when I was a dealer. This was part of what Buz King developed when HSS regained US distributorship of Sonor and then lost Slingerland.
This was some clunky looking stuff. The plating was crude, as was that of the Force and Force Custom drums. Cheap chrome over cheap base metal. Looked ok new, but in time, not so much! If you ever see wing nuts with THIS version of the logo, it's from this series of drums/hardware.
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The stands were actually pretty stout and for the money had the largest diameter tubes you could find. The cymbal tilters were generic, unimpressive, and there were times I had trouble getting the two parts lined up to get a good tightening of the wing nut. I get what Buz was doing when he developed these, and I suppose they hit their mark. And technically, they weren't "Sonor", but they were pretty close in the branding and certainly not anything that any Sonor owner I know would have boasted about owning.
And now for the rest of the story...
My Dad had a houseboat on Lake Seminole and from time to time I would go over for the weekend. He had a buddy that was a drummer in a band that was playing somewhere around the arena. Seems like he played on old set of Pearl or something and had a hodgepodge of hardware, but at the time I hadn't gone up and looked. I told him I was a Sonor guy and he started praising his Sonor cymbal stands and talking about how great they were and whatever.
I eventually made my way up to his rig and he had a pair of semi-rusty (maybe the snob in me is slightly exaggerating) Force 1000 cymbal stands. I was thinking that if he ever got himself the real deal, he would REALLY be in hog heaven.
Now that I ponder this, it gives me an idea for another topic to post about. 