It started as a beautiful crisp autumn day with slightly chilly weather at last after a month of summer weather all through March. Saw the long awaited overseas news headlines that brought a big smile to my face and figured it was a good day to fit new tuners to my guitar.
A luthier friend had found these for me and they arrived earlier this week. Squee!!!
In anticipation I’d checked the screws on the old tuners to see they would easily come out, a little birdie told me I was mad to touch the guitar seeing I’ll be using it heaps at a muso’s camping gathering over the long Easter weekend coming up. I told the birdie to fly away.
I figured it would take me an hour at most, with all the prep and thought I’d put into it. I’d checked the size of the new tuners, an exact match, the screw holes lined up, nothing was gonna get in my way. The old tuners came out easily enough, now it was time to take out the old ferrules.
They were quite tight and didn’t want to budge. So I grabbed a drift and tapped on the first one. It didn’t want to move so I tapped a bit harder.
Oops.
Surprisingly I didn’t swear. I think the shock was just too much. Got on the phone to my luthier friend and chatted about the options. Here’s the glue I used.
It’s a glue I use in my other hobby, making RC airplanes from balsa and foam.
After about 15 minutes I pulled the clamp off and it was a bit high on one side of the fix so I put a spacer in on that side of the fix and re-clamped.
I’m happy, possibly poor choice of words, with the outcome. All things considered. That picture was chosen with the light at the most reflective angle I could arrange.
My luthier friend coached me on how to remove the ferrules. I took a long razor knife, the kind with the break off / disposable blades and worked it between the top of the headstock and the ferrule itself. Initially it wouldn’t even fit at all but with patience and caution I got the blade under a couple of the ferrules and slowly worked it around trying to get the ferrule up so I could work it further with a tiny screwdriver between the razor blade and the ferrule.
As it turned out, I could not get the ferrules to budge enough to proceed any further. I didn’t want to force them and make my day any worse.
So I figured the old ferrules would have to stay, I did have reservations about putting shinny new ferrules on the guitar anyway.
But the day wasn’t through with me. Sigh.
The new tuners have a slightly wider diameter shaft and no amount of coaxing, whether verbal or physical was gonna make them fit.
An old favourite saying of mine came to mind: “Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer!” but alas, it was not meant to be.
So It came time to clean up and lubricate the old tuners. I had done this once before about 8 years ago and it did make a huge difference. But as you’ll see from the pictures below, the corrosion was significant after all our coastal travels over the last 3 years. It was also the allure of 18:1 tuners that was just too good. The old tuners are 14:1 ratio.
So I got out the methylated spirits (denatured alcohol) and the graphite powder along with an old toothbrush.
I pulled each tuner completely apart, gave them a good scrub with the toothbrush, air dried them and squirted copious amounts of graphite powder on them while assembling. It was amazing how good and smooth they quickly felt. They had been very graunchy when tuning the guitar lately.
The tuners went back on the guitar nicely and it’s restrung and ready for action.
It’s been a great lesson for me and I have posted as much detail as possible in the hope that it guides some of you as to what to do / what not to do.
The picture above was taken straight on with no reflection so as to minimize how noticeable the damage is. My guess is few will notice it, yet it will jump out at me all the time.
I’m particularly thankful I didn’t try this on my more expensive guitar. It’s painful for me in that this guitar, aka Racklesnatch, is a personal favourite of mine and I never want anything bad to happen to it.
There is a silver lining to every cloud and the silver lining today is I’m pretty sure I convinced my wife this will affect the tonality of the guitar to the degree that a new guitar is definitely needed. 
, but fantastically solved 
and added a nice story for your guitar…
