Some Notes On Shime Building

As with all things, the more you do something the more you learn how to do it well. Shime are no exception. Here are some notes on how the process evolved between drums. I'm sure I will continue to attempt to refine the process as I make more shime in the future.

How you stretch the hides greatly affects not only the tone of the completed shime but also the ease and quality of the stitching and the look of the finished head. There are a lot of factors working against you . . . the hide stretches more in one direction than another, it's difficult to keep the ring centered in the hide . . . the list goes on.

With the first drum I used the "every fifth hole" method Brian described in his excellent Odeko making website (Thanks again Brian!). I felt that, though it stretched well on the ring, the folds in the hide gave me a number of problems when it came time to stitch the hide to the ring. After some thought I gave this new method a try;  prior to the actual stretching process I did a "pleating stitch" (fancy name I just made up). I measured out and punched the holes for the stretching line, but instead of Brian's method I ran the line through them in a circular pattern, alternating "top down", "bottom up" though each hole. Now when I pulled the line tight I got evenly spaced "pleats" in the underside of the head that looked something like this.

I pulled this line tight and tied it off to keep the pleats in place. At this point I used a modified version of Brian's stretching method to tighten the hide on the ring, running a line between every fifth pleat. (or as close as I could manage) I want to refine this process some more, putting in the correct number of pleats so that all the rope holes land between the pleats, etc, but this still gave me a more uniform surface on the back of the head and made stitching easier, and more importantly allowed more even and stronger stitches.

And speaking of stitching . . . the first drum I used a regular old "over-under" sort of stitch. It worked just fine, but wasn't necessarily the prettiest or strongest option I could have chosen. So this time I used a stitch that was more of a "two forward, one back" sort of deal. (I'm sure these stitches have names, but I don't know them)
Here are the results:

The more even terrain on the back of the head allowed me to use finer, closer together stitches and I think the two forward one back stitch yielded a more attractive result. That and I got a bit better at this type of sewing after many hours of practice, an unknown number of band-aids, and no few blood sacrifices to the taiko gods.