iNDe BR5 Tom Holder | No drilling needed

iNDe Drum Lab has released the BR5 Universal Tom Holder, a bracket that mounts a tom to your bass drum without putting a single new hole in the shell.

That is the company’s whole reason for existing, so the news isn’t the no-drill part. It’s the word “universal” — and this time it looks earned.

For the unfamiliar: iNDe — Independent Drum Lab, of Kalamazoo, Michigan — builds drill-free retrofit mounting hardware, rails and brackets for drummers who want to rearrange a kit without permanently altering it.

How does it mount without drilling?

It uses holes that are already there.

The BR5 base brackets replace two of your existing lugs, bolting into the lug holes and picking up the tom arm from there. Take the lugs off, put the brackets on, and the shell is as intact as it was when you started. Change your mind in a year and you swap the lugs back.

Look at how the base sits. It is a wide, splayed plate rather than a block, so the load spreads across two lug points instead of hanging off one — which is the whole trick to holding a tom on a shell you haven’t reinforced.

That matters most on the drums you would never take a drill to — a vintage kit, a shell you might resell, or anything you don’t actually own.

What is new about the BR5

Compatibility, and it is a real jump.

The BR5 takes single-ended lugs and double-ended centre-mount lugs, at any hole spacing between 1in and 3in. For comparison, iNDe’s existing low-profile drill-free rail is listed for 1in to 2in. Widening the window and adding centre-mount lugs pulls in a lot of drums that previously fitted nothing in the catalogue.

Off the drum you can see how much movement is built in. The riser hinges twice, then a rubber ball joint takes the L-arm, so angle and tilt are set independently of height. Position a tom with one of these and you should be able to get it where you want it rather than where the bracket allows.

Fitment comes down to three L-arm sizes: 9.5mm, 10.5mm and 12.7mm — near enough 3/8in at the bottom, a straight 1/2in at the top. Between them they cover the common tom-arm diameters, so you meet your existing arm rather than re-buying it.

If your kit is assembled out of two or three makers’ drums, that combination is the point of the product.

See it in action

Here is the BR5 being put through its paces:

What does it cost?

iNDe hasn’t said, and we’re not going to invent a number. No price, no ship date. The brand’s existing drill-free rails sit around the $170–$210 mark, which tells you the neighbourhood but not the price — keep an eye on iNDe’s tom holder range for the listing.

Final thoughts

There is nothing glamorous about a bracket. But “mount a tom on this bass drum without drilling it” is a genuinely annoying problem, and the usual answers are a snake-pit of adapters or a cymbal stand eating floor space you haven’t got.

The caveat is the one every quiet launch gets: no price, no availability, and every photo above is iNDe’s own. Nobody independent has loaded a tom onto one and gigged it yet.

Still — the 1in-to-3in window plus centre-mount lugs is exactly the unglamorous detail that decides whether a mount fits your kit or lives in a drawer. Worth watching.

More on the boring-but-essential half of the kit in our hardware section, including bass drum cymbal mounts for the neighbouring problem. And if the drum you want this on is still out there somewhere, buying used drums online covers what to check before you pay.