As an amateur drummer, I often play shows where I have to bring my own drum kit to the venue, which is particularly challenging because I do not have a car. Loading a full-size kit in and out of gigs is labour intensive even with transportation, and the idea of taking one on the Underground is unrealistic.

That led me to nesting kits: drum kits designed so the shells split open and pack inside one another like Russian dolls, making them much easier to transport. However, the ones I had seen on eBay were always prohibitively expensive, so I decided to try making my own.

I bought a cheap old bass drum with a fairly specific goal in mind: turn it into a nesting drum that would be much easier to transport without compromising too much on sound. I wanted something compact enough to be practical, but still usable as a proper gigging bass drum.

The donor drum

This is the original 20" bass drum before any work had begun. I bought a cheap second-hand drum because I had never done such a conversion before and I wasn’t sure how successful the project would be.

Cutting the shell in two

I needed to cleanly cut the drum in half, but I do not own any expensive benchtop woodworking tools. So I made a simple router jig that clamped to the side of a table and let me cut a clean, level line all the way around the shell.

This method of cutting was extremely loud and, in the end, not especially accurate. As I rotated the drum, it occasionally slipped, which created an uneven edge that I had to correct later with a lot of sanding. If I did this again, I would probably cut the shell with a handsaw instead and save my neighbours the noise.

Sanding

As mentioned above, I discovered that my jig was slightly inaccurate when it came to cutting a straight line all the way around the drum. To fix that, I first removed the high points from the shell with a hand-held drill and a sanding attachment.

After removing the higher points along the rim of each half, I sanded the entire edge with finer sandpaper on a flat surface to get it properly level.

Cutting the lip

Next, I reused my cutting jig with a hacked-together guard to remove a thin strip of material along the edge of each half, creating two interlocking rims so the drum would fit together neatly like a jigsaw puzzle.

Overall, I am quite happy with how the interlocking rims turned out.

Adding locking hardware

At this point, I fitted three latches around the shell so the two halves could be secured together.

Wrapping the shell

Once the structure was finished, I rewrapped the drum in black to give it a clean finish.

The completed nesting drum

Finally, I was done and the drum was assembled. Overall, it looked and performed very well. The following photo shows the drum at its first gig: a compact live setup where floor space and portability really mattered.

Reflection

It ended up sounding great for its size and, with the addition of ultra-lightweight hardware, was much more portable than any other kit I’d seen. I could fit the snare and cymbals inside the bass drum and carry the rest of the hardware in a second bag, which made getting to gigs much more manageable. I learned a lot during this project, especially about where accuracy matters and where a rougher approach is good enough, and I will definitely be making another drum like this in the future.

I post more of my drumming projects and playing on my Instagram.