I just built a 14" x 12" rack tom. I build furniture as a hobby so building a stave drum wasn't hard for me especially since I have the tools necessary. You just need to decide the number of staves you want to use, then calculate the angle on the edge of each stave and the stave width to give you the desired diameter. For my drum, I used some old solid oak flooring that was given to me. The drum had 24 staves, a 7.5 degree angle on each edge and each stave was 1-7/8" wide and the widest point. Glued it up, sanded it to round then routed the bearing edges to the proper width. Since this was my first one to build, I didn't plane the wood down before I started which made the drum a little heavy. On future builds, I would plane the wood to between 1/2" and 5/8" before I started.
I am sure there are some folks on this site that are a lot better and more experienced at building stave drums than me. They will provide a better response than this one. Good luck.
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