NEWPORT – All of the drumsticks produced at Vic Firth are made from hickory imported in board form from Appalachia and dried in seven kilns at the Newport site.

“A tree is 50 percent moisture,” explained Mike Gault, president of operations at Vic Firth. “We slowly dry the wood for 10 days to two weeks until the moisture content drops to 6 to 8 percent.”

Vic Firth is the only drumstick manufacturer that buys its wood green, he said.

After drying, the wood is stored in humidity-controlled rooms. Then the highest-quality boards are refined and run through a doweling machine. “We’ve adopted some methods from pool cue manufacturers to keep our wood straight,” Gault said. “This helps set us apart in the business.”

Each dowel goes through a five-step machining process – three more than any other drumstick manufacturer, Gault said. The square rod is turned into a round dowel. It is sanded and shaped using a metal template unique to the company.

A company-created injection molding process surrounds the tip of the stick with plastic. “We were buying tips and gluing them on, but they were flying off. We developed this process and our number one problem went away,” Gault said.

Each stick is sorted by weight and then tone – they are struck quickly with a small hammer and a computer assesses their tone and pitch.

Firth discovered the difference in pitch when, 20 years ago, he dropped a bunch of drumsticks on his basement floor. “Before we developed this computer program, I used to have eight guys sitting in a warehouse tapping each stick on a stone,” Firth said. “When we started getting up to 15 million, we couldn’t do that.”

As Gault leads the way deeper into the factory, the finished products begin appearing: There are 400 different Vic Firth products, ranging from custom drumsticks for music industry stars to an entire line just for marching bands. There are custom black sticks, sticks with special grips, green or maroon sticks, sticks with lights for blackout drumming, sticks that are thick and heavy, private-label sticks and practice pads. There’s also the gourmet line of pepper and salt mills and rolling pins.