Polmuz Drums – Polish maker of drum kits, snares and cymbals, built custom.

I have been working with drums since 2006, when we started DrumStore, our drum shop in Gdynia, Poland. Over the years countless kits from all kinds of brands have passed through our workshop, and each one taught us something. Polmuz, our drum brand, is everything we took away from that.

Today Polmuz is four drum kit models: from Model 4 for beginners, through Model 3, to Models 2 and 1, which we build to order in our own workshop. Every custom kit starts with a conversation and ends with an instrument that is one of a kind.

The shell carries a lifetime warranty. Many professional drummers play Polmuz, and the best recommendation of all is that the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Polish Armed Forces have ordered instruments from us too.

Tomasz Stukan

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Look inside the drum before you buy it.

Whether a drum sings is decided by things you cannot see in a shop photo: the bearing edge, the drilling, the screws inside. We show them, because we have something to show.

Design your own drum Go to the Polmuz shop Come to the workshop

4.8mmMaple plywood, six plies. Thin, so the shell resonates.

45°Bearing edge cut, polished and waxed.

0.2mmTolerance on the lug hole layout.

lifetimeWarranty on the shell for the first owner.

What actually matters

Four things a photo will not show you

We don’t say “the finest materials”. We say which, how much and why.

6plies

Thin maple plywood

Back in 2019 I ordered a pile of different plywoods, thicker and thinner, and listened to what sounded better. This one won: six plies, 4.8 mm.

Knock on the bare shell and you hear its note — long and clean. If a piece of wood goes silent when you hit it, the drum built from it will be dead too.

A side effect: a lighter kit. You notice it every time you carry it to a gig.

45°

The edge the head rests on

A drumhead is rounded where it meets the hoop and flat further in. Our edge lands on the flat part — which is why the drum tunes low and stays in tune.

We built about ten shells with different edges and listened. The winner was the same edge we knew from vintage drums.

We cut it, polish it smooth and wax it. When people come to the workshop, I make them touch it.

0.2mm

Drilling drawn like ship sections

I trained as an engineer and used to design ships. I draw the hole layout in QCAD as a flat development of the shell, exactly the way you draw the flat sections of a hull.

A shell is never a perfect circle — it is usually a slight ellipse. Lugs from different makers differ too. Precise drilling evens all that out.

An ordinary drill bit costs five zloty. We work with top-grade bits, Smart Step type — and you can see that difference in the hole.

2× wax

The inside nobody ever looks at

The inside of the shell is waxed and oiled twice. Nobody paints a wooden house with polyurethane — you oil it and wax it, so the wood keeps breathing and moisture stays out.

The mounting screws are Polish-made stainless acid-resistant steel, the kind used in shipbuilding. Not the black ones that start rusting from a single scratch.

In the photo you can see the label with the owner’s name. That is where the lifetime warranty starts.

Inside of the shell with the Polmuz label and stainless screws

Snare drums

A throw-off that really lets the wires go

A typical throw-off pulls the wires 7 mm off the bottom head. Ours pulls them 14.

typical throw-off7 mm

throw-off in our snares14 mm

What it means when you play

The wires sit against the bottom head, and that is what gives a snare its crack. When you want the snare to sound like a tom or a bongo, you drop them with the throw-off.

At 7 mm the wires stop too close. They still vibrate with the head and you hear buzzing underneath — you know it from cheaper snares: the throw-off is down and the drum still isn’t clean. At 14 mm the wires are genuinely far away and go completely quiet.

You hear it best on a rim shot. With the snares off, a hard hit on the hoop should not move them at all — but when the throw-off only drops a little, the wires bounce off the resonant head and answer every hit like that.

You also hear it in quiet passages and in the studio, where that buzz gets into every microphone on stage and cannot be taken out afterwards.

Polmuz aluminium snare drum — throw-off and wires visible

SpaceForest · Gdynia

A drum built from a rocket

A few kilometres from the workshop, the Gdynia company SpaceForest builds the suborbital rocket Perun. After the flight, its parts come to us.

In 2024 we were given the SF-1000 engine chamber and sections of the prototype airframe that were no longer fit to fly after launch. We turned the engine chamber into a snare drum and the airframe into a bass drum — the first drums in Poland built from rocket structure.

Nobody had ever worked that material as an instrument maker: we settled the edge angle, the wall thickness and the way hardware is mounted by testing on composite offcuts. The instruments played at the Sopot Molo Jazz Festival, and in April 2026 they were shown at the 3rd Drum Marathon at the Academy of Music in Gdańsk.

The Perun rocket and a drum shell cut from its airframe — Where the material comes from: a section of the Perun rocket airframe.

Polmuz drum kit with a carbon fibre shell — The finished instrument. Dense carbon fibre sounds remarkable, and it looks like the inside of a race car.

Finishes

Five painting cycles

Drums are the most spectacular instrument on stage. They don’t have to sit at the back as a barely visible backdrop — they can stand next to the front man.

You are not stuck with a maker’s colour chart or with whatever happens to be on a distributor’s shelf. We match colour with a spectrometer to whatever you bring us — by measurement, not by eye.

For us a finish is not only how it looks. A thick coat of paint chokes the shell, which is why we lay most colours in oil and wax — thin, so the wood keeps working. A drum should sound as good as it looks.

Every kit is painted by hand, with no stencil. Two drums from the same cycle never come out identical — and that is the point. Bring your own idea, or pick one of the five directions we have been developing since 2020.

Cykl malarski I · since 2020

Oil and wax fade

Our own shading method, applied by hand in oil and wax only — no spray, no lacquer. The colour runs out into bare wood, and the thin coat of wax does not choke the shell. The same technique also gives solid colours — flat black wax is the one people order most.

Cykl malarski II · since 2022

Brushwork

Painted finishes that keep the movement of the brush, the way a painting does. Every kit is painted by hand, with no stencil, so no two come out alike.

Cykl malarski III · 2024

Painting and ornament

Folk flower motifs — poppies, cornflowers, sunflowers — painted by hand on a white wax fade running out into wood. The ornament is designed like a textile and carried across the whole kit.

Cykl malarski IV · 2026

Airbrush

Airbrush work using stencils drawn in CAD. The look of “oyster” wrap rebuilt in lacquer, layer after layer.

Cykl malarski V

Lacquer

Saturated colours, colour-to-colour fades and shaded lacquer on bubinga that brings out the grain.

Selected work

The National Philharmonic and the Polish Army

Commissions for institutions — one kit for a philharmonic stage, two for an army unit.

National Philharmonic, Warsaw · 2025

A master instrument

A six-piece kit built to special order. The fade is laid by hand in oil and wax only, with no spray and no lacquer, on 4.8 mm European maple. We developed the wax polishing for this commission — it brings out the grain.

Polish Armed Forces · 2023

Kits in national colours

Two kits built to order: a white-and-red one with inlay cut into the shell, and a red one with artistic painting. The national emblem is painted by hand on the heads.

Your order

What you choose when you place an order

We want people to know straight away that the kit on that stage is yours.

Dimensions: Depth and diameter of every drum, one by one.
Shell material: Maple, bubinga, walnut. Or metal — copper and aluminium, raw or aged.
Finish: Wax and oil, lacquer or wrap.
Hardware and its colour: The type of lugs and hoops, chrome, gold or black.
Inlay: We cut a groove in the shell and glue in a one-millimetre strip. It is not a sticker — getting it even on a round shell is very hard.
Graphics: Your design or ours. On the shell, on the resonant head, your band’s logo.
Artwork: Hand painting, ornament, shading — one of the five cycles, or something entirely new.
Name label: Inside the shell, with the owner’s name on it.

Price

Custom does not have to cost as much as a car

Typical price of a custom kit

PLN 40,000–80,000

That is what a custom order costs at the makers everybody knows.

A custom Polmuz kit

from PLN 5,500

The most expensive, most elaborate Polmuz we have ever built came to PLN 40,000.

If the plywood delaminates, something cracks, the drum stops sounding — we repair it free of charge.

We say that calmly, because we know what we build: in all these years nobody has had to use that warranty yet. But it is good to have it.

Lifetime warranty on the shell for the first owner. It covers plywood and metal — brass, aluminium, copper — in models 1–4. Hardware and stands 36 months. Acrylic shells 24 months.

Before you collect it, and long after

We build to order and we stay with that drum

How long it takes

Normally one to four months. With elaborate painting it can run to eight — hand painting and waxing cannot be rushed.

Along the way we send photos from each stage of the build, so you can watch your instrument take shape instead of waiting blind.

What happens next

You talk directly to the person who built the drum. After the purchase we advise on choosing heads, adjusting hardware and tuning.

We also do full servicing — from hardware replacement to restoring shells and bearing edges. Any drum that left our workshop can come back to be refreshed and brought into full shape again.

They play Polmuz