Mint Sonor Vintage Double Row Headless Tambourine 1950s Video

Mint condition Sonor headless double row tambourine 250mm (10 inch). Absolute mint condition. You can tell it's 50s or 60s vintage Sonor from the brown industrial paint and the long diagonal scarf joint visible on the inside. Has a crisp, sharp attack and a fast decay. Bam! See the video.

Looking closely at the specific mid-century manufacturing methods of both Meinl and Sonor clarifies why all your physical clues point toward Sonor.

Why It Fits Vintage Sonor:

• The Master of Bent-Wood Shells: Sonor has a legendary history of multi-ply wood fabrication stemming from their core drum factory operations in Bad Berleburg (West Germany). During the mid-20th century, Sonor routinely utilized long, slanted/tapered scarf joints and chamfered edge profiles on their wooden concert percussion, tambourines, and symphonic hand drums.
• The Strict Metric Tooling: Sonor’s historical catalogs standardized all small hand percussion to exact metric sizes (250mm).
• The "Industrial" Opaque Paint: Vintage Sonor school, student, and orchestral hand instruments from the 1960s and 1970s frequently featured an opaque, ultra-durable paint finish (often in dark brown, reddish-brown, or deep beige) designed to withstand heavy institutional use without showing wood wear.

Because Sonor relied on simple paper labels or adhesive metal foil badges for their handheld orchestral lines, these tags commonly peeled right off over time—leaving behind a beautifully machined, mystery 250mm frame.

Henry Nelson Luthiery stuff might cost more than other listings, but we think it's worth it. We're not going anywhere. We stand behind our gear. We do research and accurate descriptions. We test our stuff and usually do restoration work; sometimes light, sometimes intense (read our item descriptions for details). In addition, our vintage gear holds its value, unlike new stuff. We have a no-hassle return policy. The return shipping is on you, but we refund the item price and shipping. Simply return it in the same condition in a timely manner.