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String tuners on a headless bass way too stiff...


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Howdy! 
I have a nice custom made fretless purchased from a basschatter and all was good until  the tuners couldn't turn anymore 

and I could not get the bass back to standard  tuning .  I sprayed some dw40 to no avail

the a string snapped . I'm wondering if it's best to give it in to a repairers or is it something like a washer could be needed?

The tuning system is more like a kubicki  with the ' wheels' by the bridge but steinberger type tuners also,.

please advise if you can 

Thanks 

9810FCFA-A3B9-4665-A146-AE6B006F49C7.jpeg

Edited by RAY AGAINST THE MACHINE
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Lubrication of some sort - pencil graphite (HB) on the threads can work very well, or sparingly applied WD40.  Most important is to go carefully to avoid damaging threads.  Not sure exactly what the system is, but without a fixed length double ball string it is possible to have strings that are too long for the travel of the threads..so you run out of room on the tuners. Check for this first?

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I have one of those (in silver) on one of my basses.

image.jpeg

Not the best system I've ever encountered...Can be a bit of a pain to use sometimes - I mainly because the tuners are quite stiff, as you say.

I don't use it very often so haven't got a solution for you - it may give me an excuse to get it out of it's case this weekend though.

 

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44 minutes ago, TheGreek said:

I have one of those (in silver) on one of my basses.

image.jpeg

Not the best system I've ever encountered...Can be a bit of a pain to use sometimes - I mainly because the tuners are quite stiff, as you say.

I don't use it very often so haven't got a solution for you - it may give me an excuse to get it out of it's case this weekend though.

 

Nice bass😼

I don't think yours has the Kubicki style wheels tho? It may be relevant , or may not . 
glad I've given you ideas 😹

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I had a bass with the same tuner unit - it's a fairly flawed design which is hard to get to work well!

My bass had a head-end string clamp and I strung it with the ball-ends at the tuner end, removing the need to wrap the string around the cams. This made it a lot easier to tune without the mechanism becoming stiff - but the gearing on the system still made incremental tuning unnecessarily fiddly and inaccurate.

If I'd kept the bass, I'd have looked at replacing it with one of the Steinberger-derived designs.

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Thanks bass assassin . 
If there was a way of swapping that unit with a steinberger one I would . The steinberger ones come up on ebay a lot of the time ,but I have a feeling that if I got one it wouldn't fit . 
I'm wondering if I took it to a tech, whether it would be expensive to repair and would it be a permanent fix in a good way, or whether they may dissemble it and spray lubricant and I'd have same problem further down the line.Its not my main bass , but it is the lightest . 

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Fitting a Steiny-type replacement (the cheap Chinese units are clones of Hohner's Steinberger licensed version) would require some modifications. It wouldn't be a straight swap, I think the routing for the existing bridge would need to be filled & then re-routed for the replacement.

Probably not a massive job for a decent luthier - maybe give our own Andyjr1515 a shout, I get the impression he's quite handy!

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