Vintage Toy Drum Set

My brother received a toy drum set when he was maybe two years old for Christmas. We have an old picture of him sitting behind it at my grandparents' house. Today my brother is an actual drummer. Ever since he moved back to this area I have been thinking about that old drum set. He still talks about it and the family enjoys that old picture. I think part of the reason why we all remember it (besides because he actually became a drummer) is because it had this scary looking clown on the front of it.

I did some research online about the drum set. It is an Ohio Art Tot Traps drum set. Obvioulsy it is no longer manufactured and is apparently pretty hard to find. Its not really valuable but it just seems like something that nobody kept around. I finally found one on eBay. The only problem was it was in Australia. I talked to my mom about it and we kind of went back and forth about if we wanted to buy it since the shipping was so expensive (the actual item was only $10). We ended up missing the first auction but luckily the seller put it up again and we went for it.

The drum set was in pretty rough shape. I had to knock some dents out of the bass drum shell and had to clean all the plastic because it was pretty yellow. The picture is after the cleaning and before reassembly. The biggest issue was the image of the clown on the front. It was in pretty rough shape.

So I redid the image in Adobe Illustrator and printed it out to match the drum. I coated it with a spray to make it last longer as well. Some other cosmetic additions and a new triangle and it was ready to go.

I think it turned out pretty good. My brother really liked it when we presented it to him. Of course we had to recreate the picture from when he was a kid. It was definitely a fun project for me.