Three Years!!??

I can't believe it's been three years, almost to the day, since I last posted. I'm sure every single person (all three of them!) who used to follow my blog has given up on me and moved on.  But I'm back!  I never stopped drumming during that three years, I just got a bit too busy to document everything I was doing. Or I just didn't have anything interesting to relate. I'm not sure which.

Enough excuses and back to the good stuff! If you've ever wanted to make Nagado Daiko I bet you've considered how to go about getting those tacks so straight and even.

Today, I'm going to focus on the even part of that. How do you know how far apart to put the tacks so none of them are closer together than the others?  Often when you choose a distance to put between each tack it will look great until you return to the place you started and the tacks either get too close together or too far apart.

Of course many of you are saying to yourselves, "This isn't rocket surgery. Just to do the maths!".

And those people would be absolutely correct. Some simple math provides an easy, accurate solution to all your tack spacing woes. The formula is this:

 where
C = circumference of the drum at the point you want to put the tacks
N = the number of tacks you want to use
T = the diameter of a single tack

Your result will be W, the width of the pace between each tack. There ya have it! Simple, yet effective. If you run the calculations and discover that the gap is too wide, increase the number of tacks until it's more to your liking.

To be clear; this is the distance between the edges of the tacks, not from the tack center point to the next tack center point. 

If any of this is confusing (or, heaven forbid, you discover flaws in my math!) don't hesitate to let me know and I'll do my best to clarify.

It's good to be back!