Vintage tuners on STA 1M kit

[Bradtb04]

Hi, I am looking at putting vintage tuners on my STA 1M kit. I had a look at some Gotoh ones, but they required different measurements to what is on my headstock.
Has anyone had experience with vintage tuners on one of these kits, or a similar kit with the same headstock?
If so, which tuner brand were they?
Thanks for any replies.

[king casey]

The problem with vintage tuner is the holes are 8mm as opposed to the kit's 10.
I've put vintage tuners on a couple of builds but that entailed dowelling up the original holes.


cheers, Mark.

[DrNomis_44]

You can buy 10mm bushings for vintage style tuners from Realtone Music, here's a link to their website:

https://www.realparts.com.au/

[Bakersdozen]

Depending on what kind of tuners they are and how they mount, you can get conversion bushings for them.

https://www.realparts.com.au/kluson-...ts-nickel.html

Edit: it seems the doctor beat me to it. However upon looking, I'm not sure these will work for Strat style tuners as they use a screw from the front of the headstock to secure them. I'm happy to be wrong, but these conversion bushings I've used successfully for mounting vintage tuners to LP style headstocks which use different style tuners.

[king casey]

Vintage tuners also require accurately placed tuner holes. They are butted up together and you are at the mercy of the Pitbull tuner hole driller to get them even.


BTW I happen to have a spare set of 10mm conversion bushings.
Probably set you back the cost of posting.

cheers, Mark.

[Simon Barden]

The main problem as has been mentioned is the hole spacing. The kit holes aren't the best aligned to start with, but to fit vintage tuners, you do need the correctly spaced holes and all in a straight line You'd really have to dowel the existing holes and then redrill. Modern arrangements tend to have the overall distance between E to E tuner post centres slightly too short. I was just looking at fitting some vintage-style tuners on a Squier Tele neck, but the E to E distance on the Squier was 2mm too close together.

If the hole spacing on your neck is similar to that Squier, you can of course file down the ends of the tuners to make them fit, as you only have to file around 0.2mm off each end of the tuners where they butt up against each other to get them to fit.

If they are too far apart, then the standard screws won't hold the tuners in place, so you could use bigger screws with wider heads to hold them in place. I did this on a cheap eBay neck and whilst it worked and was OK from the front, it didn't look pretty from the back.

But because the hole point of vintage-style tuners is to match the vintage-style tuner spacing, I haven't found any that are designed to directly replace modern tuners. Probably a gap in the market there, but it remains a gap as far as I know.

I've also found that the conversion bushings can be a bit on the small side and you may also really need a slightly smaller hole diameter than 10mm, as I've had sets where the outer splines have had between a 9.5mm and 9.8mm diameter and were loose in a 10mm hole. So you may need to glue some extra material around the edge of the holes. I have no idea why you can't get slightly bigger adapter bushings, but I tried several different types and none were the stated 10mm, but all were smaller.

[Bradtb04]

Thanks for all your replies. It would seem that the holes are too far apart for the Gotoh ones and I would assume that other brands would have the same dimensions.

Thanks for the offer King Casey but if the holes are slightly too large I may have to use the 10.5mm bushings, and thanks for that link Bakersdozen and DrNorris, I have been looking at those ones.

Because of these reasons I might need to go with the stock contemporary tuners, however, would you be able to supply a picture of these screws Simon Barden (if you don't mind)? The main reason I wanted the vintage ones was to imitate a 1960 Fender as best I could so the spacing doesn't worry me as much (so long as the tuning won't be affected)

Thanks again for all your responses and thanks again for the offer King Casey it is well appreciated

[Simon Barden]

It was about 10 years ago now, so I can't remember exactly what I used. I just worked out the most suitable sized head and went to the local hardware store and bought some short screws with wide heads that looked about right. Nothing technical at all. In fact it turns out I used a mixture of original and new screws as the holes weren't evenly spaced.



Very much a bodge job, and I'd do a lot better today. But it was very cheap neck from eBay and I couldn't be bothered to remove the fake Custom Shop decal.

[JimC]

I had to deal with this issue of irregularly drilled hole spacings on my mandolin project, the source of the irregularity being my inability to drill accurate holes by hand. I managed to source some aluminium tube from the local DIY store that was the right inside diameter to go over the tuning keys, and the right outside diameter for the bushes/ferrules. I cut off a short length and cut some crude teeth in the end. Then I put the tuners in place, lubricated the tuner with candlewax (important, otherwise plating at risk) and used a hand drill to enlarge the holes exactly concentric with the tuner.

My headstock is a fairly soft sapele, and I only needed to resharpen the teeth once for all 8 holes. Now if you've got a maple headstock you'll probably need steel tube and much resharpening, but at the very least it ought to give you a really accurate guide to enlarge the holes by hand.

[Simon Barden]

With a pre-shaped headstock, you can see I also ran out of space so that the tuners are hanging out at the ends. So don't cut the headstock out until you're sure about fitting the tuners on. With the wider spacing, you may find exactly copying a 60s headstock shape gives you the same issues.

Jim, you started out with small holes for the posts then enlarged them for the bushings. The holes are already drilled and are too big for vintage tuners. Making them even larger isn't really going to work here.