Overview
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
It's January 2026 and I’ve been working on documenting Black Panthers for nearly six years now, and I’ve been down every rabbit-hole I could find trying to track them all down. Countless hours downloading and pouring over catalogues in several languages, tracking old Mapex and Black Panther sites for old listings on the WayBackMachine, Googling every keyword I could think of. I thought I was pretty solid on every mainline model ever produced, and all that was left was custom models and the odd prototype.
Then on Thursday 14 Jan 2025, in a comment on another FB post about the Valvona 14", up jumps long-term contributor and snare collector extraordinaire David O’Grady who casually mentions a 13x3.5 version. Picture a massive cartoon-like double-take. Nah. Can’t be. That’s not mentioned anywhere. Must be a mistake. But it’s David, so there must be something behind it. Maybe an old magazine article I’ve missed or a foreign catalogue than isn’t online. Something. So there were (admittedly sceptical) messages along the lines of “are you absolutely sure about this?”
Yes he was sure.
Why?
Because he $£*&ing HAS ONE!!!!!!
(Cue an ex-ginger Mapex geek swooning like a Victorian spinster in an overtight corset).
Now you might be thinking “photos, or it didn’t happen”.
Ok then – check out the shots he sent.
Well played David well played. You are a steely-eyed missile man.
Just shows you – Mark Twain was dead on!
The 14"x5.5" first appears on the newly launched Black Panther Snares website somewhere around the middle of 2004 and is gone by the middle of 2005. The website never mentions either this or the 14" piccolo model, but I'm assuming they were produced at the same time, so I'm calling this a 2004 birth until I find out otherwise.
Main photo and similar courtesy of David O'Grady - thanks a million David!
