I was trying to find information about a used Noble & Cooley snare drum last week and when searching for information about their serial numbers, all of the results mentioned to contact them to ask for info.
It was hard to believe that the info wasn’t available anywhere, but after searching for a while longer, I finally decided to follow that advice and went to the contact page on the Noble and Cooley site.
To my surprise, the answer to my question was right there in the placeholder text of one of the form fields! Because I’m a nerd, it makes sense to me why that placeholder text isn’t being indexed by Google, so I’m sharing it here with the hope that it’ll be more easily found by others in the future.
Noble and Cooley Serial Numbers
Here is the official info from Noble & Cooley:
For drums made before 2000, the first two numbers of the serial are the last two numbers of the year it was made, but reversed. So ’19’ is 1991, and ’89’ is 1998.
For drums made after 2000, the first two digits of the serial are in proper order, so ’16’ was made in 2016.
