The problem of headless tuners has taken up quite a bit of my time and energy this winter. I’ve joined the forum to add my two pence to this discussion, and benefit from everyone else’s experience.
I started out by looking at what I could buy, which included:
- Hipshot. Nice, but expensive. Especially in the UK with tax and current exchange rates.
- ABM. Klaus Müller, the force behind ABM, died in 2007 and the new brand owners don’t seem very interested in the headless market. They don’t seem to have any stock.
- ETS and I have exchanged emails, but their production is sporadic.
- There are several East Asian products. I don’t fancy the worm gear designs because of its inherent mechanical inefficiency.
- Overlord. Cheap castings, and very heavy if you want a tremolo bridge.
Then I thought about making my own headless tuners. All the inline tuners I’ve seen use M3 threads. There are other types of thread, with different turn/pull ratios, but they need larger screw diameters. What you gain in turn/pull ratio you can lose in the ratio of knob/screw diameters. For example, a 3/16 inch diameter 30 tpi thread gives exactly the same gearing ratio as M3, and M3 is a global standard. Taps and dies are easy to find if you want to make your own parts. So M3 seemed the way to go.
The next question was how to find knurled rod for the tuner knobs. I don’t have a metal lathe to make my own. I tried knurled bolt heads of the type which have just been discussed, but found that they aren’t long enough to give adequate finger grip.
At this point I decided to use an Overlord tuner as a source of parts. It was surprisingly successful:
- The first delivery had to be replaced because it was faulty. One of the tuner slugs was incorrectly tapped, and it wrecked the thread on the tuner screw.
- with the second delivery I threw away everything except the slugs, knurled tuner screws, cover with the Overlord name, and the screws which held them together. The whole trem and frame castings went, saving 1lb in weight.
- The plastic washers were replaced with M3 metal washers. One advantage of using standard screws.
- I cut and drilled a rectangular mild steel base plate to fit the underside of the Overlord cover, giving a flat non-trem tuner unit.
- All the moving parts, and the inside surfaces of the cover and base plate, were lubricated with PTFE spray to reduce friction.
- To minimise friction further I used a roller bridge. This meant sinking the bridge mounting bolts into the guitar body, and mounting the tuner unit at a 12.5 degree angle.
- It works. Tuning is very stable. Even with 10-52 strings I can tune by hand, and I can always resort to an Allen key if things get stuck.
There’s a build thread here
http://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/13 ... less-build
It’s been so successful that I’m going to do it again. This time building a guitar from scratch, with a string-through Telecaster bridge instead of a roller bridge, with the tuner unit placed flat behind it.