These claves have been played!

Is what I heard a fellow rumbero exclaim a month back at the Dio De Los Muertes rumba we have every year hear in San Francisco's own Mission District. It brings a few rumberos from  other cities in the Bay Area that I don't play with too often, which is of course where that exclamation about my claves came from.
 
Anyways, the Dio De Los Muertes parade I can say it is a fantastic event, with several thousand people all dressed in full costumes, and different processions of musicians and dancers, including several Escoles de Samba as they are so well suited for parades. The rumba was based in the park, and at times we had a couple hundred people around us. I myself played for nearly 5 hours, switching from drum to drum or instrument to instrument and also singing coro as best I can. The highlight for me was playing quinto while marking the steps of a woman in full "muertes" costume dancing on stilts to the rumba.

Here is my original post with my claves. You can see what a years worth of rumba does to the instruments. The dark ones are my favorite and you can see the striker/macho is worn almost half through, and is taped to avoid getting splinters. I really need some new ones, but good sounding claves are so hard to find. My old supplier is out of business, and I keep trying out the mass made ones in stores by LP and Meinl, etc. What can I say? I find their sound less than appealing.