Thoughts?
I bought one of these recently for an SG I picked up. I remember a buddy had one when I was a young man and I liked it, and I read a lot of reviews that were glowing (and one or two that were not, but weren't really specific) so I order one. Pricy! It's like $100, I'm expecting a well-designed heavy piece of equipment.
I take it off of the cardboard backing/shrink wrap package and observe the design. It looks like it cost about $5 to make. Cheap. The fine tuners are not even peened over on the end to keep them from unscrewing all the way. The holders for the ball ends swing on a "hinge" that is just a piece of wire driven through all 6 tuners, and with no tension on them they will "fall down" and rest on the face of the guitar. Why there is nothing across the bottom to prevent this, I can't really say, but due to the design it has to be very low to get a good break angle across the saddle anyway so it only drops down about 1 mm.
So, I burr the threads at the end to keep the fine tuners from unscrewing all the way (still retaining the full range of motion) and I put it on the studs and I go to hook the ball end of the string in there.
I use D'addarios, no idea why that would matter, but the ball ends fit very sloppily into the retainer. The slot in the retainer is probably 1.2 mm wide so the string has plenty of room to move around, but the ball end gets kind of cockeyed in there, and you have to hold it in place.
So imagine this, you are stringing up your Les Paul or whatever, you have your string through the retainer on the TP-6 and you have the other end through the tuner, you start to tighten it up, and it spins a little in the tailpiece and gets jammed in sideways, which is obviously going to cause teh string to break, so you're trying to maintain tension on both ends while you string it up.
What a fucking pain in the ass. This thing is a horrible piece of overpriced shit. So, why are there so many people saying "Oh, I have one on every Gibson I have, I love it!" if it's this much of a pain to deal with? :think:
I bought one of these recently for an SG I picked up. I remember a buddy had one when I was a young man and I liked it, and I read a lot of reviews that were glowing (and one or two that were not, but weren't really specific) so I order one. Pricy! It's like $100, I'm expecting a well-designed heavy piece of equipment.
I take it off of the cardboard backing/shrink wrap package and observe the design. It looks like it cost about $5 to make. Cheap. The fine tuners are not even peened over on the end to keep them from unscrewing all the way. The holders for the ball ends swing on a "hinge" that is just a piece of wire driven through all 6 tuners, and with no tension on them they will "fall down" and rest on the face of the guitar. Why there is nothing across the bottom to prevent this, I can't really say, but due to the design it has to be very low to get a good break angle across the saddle anyway so it only drops down about 1 mm.
So, I burr the threads at the end to keep the fine tuners from unscrewing all the way (still retaining the full range of motion) and I put it on the studs and I go to hook the ball end of the string in there.
I use D'addarios, no idea why that would matter, but the ball ends fit very sloppily into the retainer. The slot in the retainer is probably 1.2 mm wide so the string has plenty of room to move around, but the ball end gets kind of cockeyed in there, and you have to hold it in place.
So imagine this, you are stringing up your Les Paul or whatever, you have your string through the retainer on the TP-6 and you have the other end through the tuner, you start to tighten it up, and it spins a little in the tailpiece and gets jammed in sideways, which is obviously going to cause teh string to break, so you're trying to maintain tension on both ends while you string it up.
What a fucking pain in the ass. This thing is a horrible piece of overpriced shit. So, why are there so many people saying "Oh, I have one on every Gibson I have, I love it!" if it's this much of a pain to deal with? :think:
Comment