ok so we were looking around in our old mallet bag and we found this mallet. it's a world classic mallet, it's from vic firth, and the stick is printed with, "alex acuna" and then in all caps "ZURDO" the mallet is about the length of from the inside crease of your elbow to your wrist, but the shape is wacky. it's about an inch thick at the butt, like a big bass drum mallet's shaft, and then right about in the middle it has a step and then it shinks to about the size of a small bass drum mallet's shaft. but the head is wierd. it looks kind of like a cinnamon doughnut hole and it feels like its made out of hard felt but then it's got this really short brown hair all over it. so i've got this short, fat stick with a cinnamon doughnut on the end and i can't find it online anywhere and don't know what its for. but it has vic firth printed on it... somebody help? what is this for? has it been discontinued? did alex acuna come up with them?

Sounds like a basic surdo mallet. Does it compare to the Brazilian Street mallet?

http://www.vicfirth.com/products/worldclassic.html

ehh, not so much. if you could imagine a short stubby version of that, and with no wrapping around the base of the head. lol and the head is brown. but yah, the head is the same and size roughly though i know that's a pretty wide variety of heads.

Interesting stuff.

I was able to come up with this page, an index page at vicfirth.com: http://www.vicfirth.com/product/gifs/sticknames/ . Most of the way down, I found a link to "zurdo.gif", which took me to a graphic that would have been on the website. So, yeah, VF made a "Zurdo" stick once upon a time.

Also, I googled Alex Acuna and Zurdo together and got a spanish language page, http://musicorweb.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=31 . This page is actually an article written by a music teacher (cuban, maybe?), named Ricardo "Zurdo" Roque. The page also has a small mention of Acuna, maybe the two knew each other and created a weird timbale stick?

Also, "zurdo" in spanish is slang for a left hander, so like "southpaw", and surdo is Portuguese for "deaf person"...I just found it a little funny that VF has/had sticks named "southpaw" and "deaf person".

Anyway, hope I helped a little, if nothing else, I enjoy searching for stuff like that, so thanks for giving me something to do last night.

P.S. - if you contact the company, they might be able to tell you about your stick. A lot of companies have people who regularly respond to things of that nature.