One of the oldschool ways to cheaply re-wrap drums was with contact paper for shelving, but this always looked pretty poor and styles were pretty non-drum looking and very limited. Recently I was putting together a drum set from random drums I’ve collected from the trash and Craigslist, and was trying to think of ways I could re-finish it without spending a lot of money. After searching through Amazon, I found a very cheap way to rewrap drums that looks very nice!
This stuff is apparently for covering automobiles as an alternative to painting them or for adding details. It is definitely not as durable as real drum wrap, but this particular one I purchased was only $5 per roll! One roll is quite large and I was able to cover two toms with a single roll. It’s also wide enough to use on the kick drum. It is pretty thin however, so I don’t expect it to be very strong or resistant to tearing. You could possibly put a clear coat on top of it to strengthen if needed though.
The drum set you see above was re-wrapped with this exact wrap, except for the two 14″ and 15″ slingerland toms on the left above the floor tom. They match incredibly well and the chrome finish is surprisingly good! The cool thing about this stuff is there’s also some pretty exotic styles out there that would make very interesting looking drums, like Carbon Fiber.
If you want to see the full process of rebuilding this drum set and wrapping it with the $5 auto wrap, check out the YouTube playlist below.