Well I said I’d live with the Tronical Autotuners for a while and see how I get on with them.

They seem to work OK, they can tune the guitar, not as accurately as my Peterson rack tuner mind you, but close enough for Rock N’ Roll!  It seems to hold it’s tune, perhaps helped by the Brass Nut?  However, I don’t ever use alternative tunings so I don’t really need that capability, and whenever I do tune up the heads seem to go mad and go through a wild tuning cycle before settling down.  Consequently it’s destroying strings in a matter of weeks, so I’m replacing the Gibson Autotuners with manual ones.

A nice set of good old Grovers should do the trick nicely.

The Autotuners are easy to remove and the new heads fit perfectly.

All you need to do is drill the pilot holes for the screws.

Couldn’t be simpler.

While the strings are off I’m also fitting a String Butler.  Apparently they can solve a lot of the classic Gibson tuning problems.

Again it’s a dead easy fix, no drilling, they just sit under the Machine head retaining collars.  The extra washers just keeps it off the face of the headstock.

It does cover up the Les Paul signature logo, but I don’t think it looks too bad.

Making sure it’s nice and central…

While I’m at it, I could never quite get the intonation set properly, there wasn’t enough travel on the “E” and “G” string saddles so I’ve flipped them around.

That did the trick…

And it looks cool from the front and the back now, let’s face it the G-Force Autotuners are ugly!  You can see from the photo below that the strings now pass over the nut in a straight line and so helping the strings pass over the nut much more easily and so stay in tune a lot better.

Now it’s the Guitar it should have been from new….

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