Camco Bass Drum pedal Restoration project
This vintage Camco single bass pedal was an absolute pleasure to work on and really turned out to become one of my personal favourites of the year!
Simple, functional design with the visual feature focusing on the 360 degree chain cam being propped up by what seems to be a perfect clash of styling era’s, showing some hard-edged designs right along side flowing lines and feathered seams leaving an aire of slight sophistication and simplicity.
This particular pedal design was so popular and successful thoughout the years that Tama recently re-released this very pedal complete with Camco branding - which, aside from a few very minor modernised substitutes, it’s a perfect hommage to the original.
I hope you enjoy this post as much as I did completing the project!
Below you’ll see that before it’s taken apart the pedal is in quite good condition overall and was complete with no real major visible damage albeit it did “work” but definitely was very slow, unresposive and a little janky under-foot. The roller bearings also had a semi-exposed casings which isn’t neccesarily bad, but after 40+ years, they would have collected and ground up stacks of dirt causing most of (if any) this pedals issues.
The pedal was carefully inspected during a full dismantling in preperation for the next steps.
Here you can see the parts after media blasting, along with some other spot surface cleanups.
I was really enjoying the results by this stage and you might notice on the footboard and heel block that there’s dynamic featured surface finishing with blasted, polised and machined surfaces - enhancing the visual aspects of this pedal even more.
Other things such as bleach cleaning the beater, putting a new clear laminate layer over the “U.S. Pat.” yellow sticker on the cam to preserve it, replacing the dented dome nut on the main axle with a stainless steel item, replacing the spring set with one more appropriate, x2 new semi-exposed bearings paying respects to the original look and of course, as usual, every nut, bolt, screw, washer etc. has been meticulously attended to before final reassmbly + setup.
…An example of the definition of “less is more”.
In conclusion and as I mentioned earlier, this pedal definitely caught me off guard and turned out to be one of my favourite projects this year!
Here you can see it in all it’s glory in full daylight, a true vinatge hero.
Camco, Tama, Hoshino Gakki, George Way or whichever way you like to think of it, this one’s got mojo :)
