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Old 03-27-2020, 10:07 AM
Alan Carruth Alan Carruth is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2011
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John Doan's guitar uses banjo fifth string tuners for the supers. I made one like that, and they work well, although it's something of a layout issue getting them all in. You need to cut down the size of the buttons, for sure!. They're not light in weight, of course, and they're more expensive than most tuners.

They're designed to be driven into a tapered hole to hold them in place, with a raised 'ear' that keeps them from rotating. I worried about splitting the block they were mounted in doing that, and came up with an alternative. The taper part of the body casting is hollow, and I found I could tap it using a metric 7mm x 1 pitch tap. This allowed me to ream the hole out to a simple snug fit, with a filed groove for the ear, and bolt them in from underneath. Your local hardware store probably doesn't carry the Allen head metric setscrews you'll need, but I got them by mail order pretty easily. I also laminated a block up out of five layers of persimmon with the grain mis-aligned to resist splitting. Over kill, perhaps, but I hate seeing stuff come back.
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