Tuners: Custom Strat Part 3

A Quick Note on Shielding:

After finishing up the shielding, I wanted to take a break from electronics for a bit, so I decided to install the tuners on the headstock. By the way, my main info source for shielding and wiring is the relatively famous Quieting the Beast: Shielding a Strat article on GuitarNutz.com.  That site is a treasure trove of helpful info on guitar electronics.

Go Naked!:

Here’s a little info about the neck for this guitar.  Most of my electric guitars have had maple necks with either rosewood or (in one case) ebony fingerboards.  My intention was to go maple/rosewood with this build, too.  However, the more I read over at unofficialwarmoth.com, the more intrigued I was by people choosing exotic woods, especially canary necks with pau ferro fingerboards.  Canary has a lot of the properties of maple, but it doesn’t require finishing.  Many of the guys on these boards swear by these ‘naked’ necks, and to be honest, I LOVE the look of canary.  So I went for it and ordered a canary/pau ferro neck.  It is stunning, and feels great!  I can’t wait to get some strings on it.

On to the Tuners:

I opted to buy Sperzel Trim-Lok tuners (from stewmac.com) even though Warmoth doesn’t carry them (they DO drill for them, though).  My reasons:

• They were highly recommended over at www.unofficialwarmoth.com (a place to spend some time researching if you are planning a build).
• They are locking tuners.
• They have graduated heights.  This is significant, because it does away with the need for string trees (aka string retainers) on a straight headstock neck like mine.

Since I’m putting a floating trem on this build (Gotoh Wilkinson VS-100), I want to eliminate friction anywhere I can.  No string tree = one less point of friction.

Putting the tuners on was pretty easy, but I took my time (over an hour) to do it right.  The captions in the pictures below tell the story, but I’ll highlight a couple of things:

• I couldn’t find the right drill bit size (2.7mm), so I tested what I DID find (2.4mm & 2.8mm) on a piece of scrap wood.  I decided to use the smaller bit (2.4mm) and roll the bit around to fit.  I wanted a tight fit rather than something too big.  But I was extremely careful about this, which is largely why it took so long.  (I suppose I could’ve ordered that size online, but I’m too impatient to hold up my project & I feel pretty confident with a drill).  It worked out great, and each tuner fit nice and snug.
• The Sperzels came with a little guide for aligning the hole which worked quite well, but I checked the fit with an actual tuner 3 times: once after marking, once again before drilling a shallow starter hole, and once on the starter hole.  What’s nice about using a slightly smaller bit is that I could correct to one side or the other by reaming to one side.

Next up: Installing the pickups & electronics!

Tuners – Mary Kaye Strat Project, Part 3

The Sperzel tuners I bought call for a 2.7mm drill bit, but all I could find were these two. Hmm…what’s up with that, Home Depot?	Here is a tuner and a couple of my test holes in a scrap piece of 2×4. The hole is for that little piece that juts out on the side nearest the 2×4. A good fit seems crucial, since it essentially does the job of a screw (that you’d find in many tuners).	Here we have the headstock before I started. These holes were pre-drilled for Sperzel tuners by Warmoth. Sorry it is out of focus.
This was actually pretty easy, but taking my time was key. The tuners came with a guide that helped line up the holes. I used a center punch to mark and then double-checked with a tuner before drilling. I also marked the depth for the holes on the drill bit with a sharpie. I used the 2.4mm bit and made a shallow hole before checking alignment one more time with a tuner. Then I rolled the bit around carefully to get the extra .3mm. The tuners fit perfectly.	Here’s a picture showing the tuner inserted from underneath and the washer and threaded sleeve that go on top.	All done!
And here’s the back.	Here’s why I chose these tuners: the heights of the poles are varied, so that no string tree is needed on a straight headstock neck!

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