First up, I’m a real life drummer and I’ve got a bunch of drums. If your in Auckland I would be happy to give you one to use as a reference.
I think that basing off the design of a real drum (but basing the look on an older one) will give you a MUCH better sound. The old two bits of leather at each end of a tube connected tightly just doesn’t come off well enough (as proven by the people who sell leather-headed drums in the walkways of malls).
Modern drums use an adjustable system that will allow you to get a much tightness on the head, thus making the best sound. The basic idea is a three part system:
The skin: this in itself has been stretched over a ring. Notice here how it is attached to the ring around the outside? We’ll come back to why this is good soon. It should come out as a fairly flat (but a little flabby) surface that is attached to the ring, however the ring will normally have a little sticky-upy bit as well.
The Shell: Should be slightly smaller than the head so that the head can fit over the top. The top of the shell should meet the part where the end of the flabby bit of the head meets the ring.
Lugs and rim: These are the bits that are around the head to create the tension. Below is a good example. The lugs are the highlighted bits. The rim is the metal circle, this should fit on the top of the head.
Now, I know I have definately not given the easiest way to build a drum, but it definately is the best sounding way, and will allow the easiest maintenance of the drums (heads need to be tightened otherwise they start sounding crap, and doing so with a thread system is hard, also, this is LARP so someone will break it, this system makes it easier to fix).
As I said earlier if your in Auck’s I’m happy to give you a drum as a reference, you can keep it. I would need to grab it from my folks place so might be a couple of weeks away, and I would take it apart with you to show how it works.
For further reference I highly reccomend using the internets. There are bound to be people out there who have documented building their own drums, try wikipedia for reading about types of drums for hints, and also googling for terms like “building drums” and thrown in words like “your own” and stuff like that.
Let me know when you complete, I’ll so give them a test run!