Perfection geared tuners on a ukulele

This came up over on the Marketplace section and I though it might be of interest here:

Our main bread and butter is making carbon fiber violins. Because of that we're a dealer for Perfection tuners. The story goes that Knilling (who makes Perfection) licensed the design from the inventor of Pegheads. Just like Pegheads, Perfections are internally geared and work very well.

So, because I have them, it made sense to retrofit a set of Perfections for a uke. They are designed for a violin peghead and are therefor overly long. I lobbed them off on a bandsaw and discovered that there is an internal aluminum shaft surrounded by black plastic. Once quickly sanded and buffed out, the aluminum floating in the middle of the black plastic looks a lot like MOP.

They work a treat and I like the look (see pics). One drawback is that the outer housing ends are threaded -- so once you've cut the tapered hole, installed the tuner and look down from the top there's a bit of space visible between the end of the shaft and the peghead wood. I walked into my favorite hardware store -- uke in hand -- looking for some sort of washer to finish things off. The best solution turned out to be a black rubber O ring, slipped down over the shaft before stringing up.

Nice tuners (we're approaching 100 violins now all over the world with no issues), work well and preserve a certain look. Also available in fancy versions

Pegheds with short stems for ukulele can be purchases from The Crafted Cow. They don't need modification. I like the washer idea though.

Tuners on ukes give me problems. There are tuners for less than 1/2 thick pegheads which are too low and peghead tuners for way over 1/2 thick which are too high and nothing in between. This problem has been solved by the adjustable height tuner, but they are very expensive. LMI used to sell them but I can't find the link. They were expensive and out of Japan at about $60 bucks +. Never tried them but I've seen them and all problems were solved. By the way they were not plenary tuners as in the OP so this doesn't really apply.

Interesting design... same planetary gearing as an electric cordless screwdriver and other devices (but smaller) ..I notice that the string hole has to be drilled off center to miss the inner spindle..otherwise if drilled central the string end would interfere with the gearing.