For four decades I have been installing strings in a manner that worked fine but was less than ideal AND did not take advantage of the design of the tuners.
Yesterday I had several guitar players over and upon looking at their guitars all three of them were strung differently from each other and my guitar.
So I thought that this might be worth a thread and I am also very interested in hearing what others do too.
Looking at the diagram below of a tuner (compliments of Stew-Mac) do you see the taper on the tuner post tapering toward the hole?
What I learned was that the purpose of this taper is to direct the string winds when the tension increases to the narrowest part of the tuner post effectively cinching the string winds against the end of the string that is passing through the hole.
In short - self cinching/snugging/locking. Go figure - this is what I did not know until David asked me what the hell I was doing when he saw me installing strings. And yes - he made me do it all over again too...
So after learning this and in combination with a suitable cordless drill with a Dunlap string winder attachment and the proper methodology/technique one can wind strings onto a guitar very quickly and precisely once you get used to how much slack you start off with for each string.
Here's how it looks on the guitar that I am playing these days:
Here is the other side showing the end of the string cut off pretty close to the post. It's cut off as close to the post as it is because it is already locked in place by string tension and this greatly reduces or eliminates the possibility of the next person who strings the guitar poking a hole in their hand/finger on a string end.....
So this is pretty basic stuff but again I didn't know any of this and my prior technique left a lot to be desired over this one.
I would be interested to hear if this is helpful to anyone or if I am the only clueless one here?
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