Replacing Peg Tuners With Geared Tuners?

Hi everyone,
I was hoping someone could give me some help with this. I have only owned ukes with geared tuners until today. I got my new Bushman and it has the peg tuners. I was wondering where the cheapest place to buy quality tuners might be and how hard it would be to install them. If it is too hard to install them anyone have ideas on where to get it done near San Francisco? And how much it would cost? I got an estimate today for $75 just for labor and I thought they were joking. Hopefully someone knows something better. I was hoping to pay half that! Thanks!:shaka:

My initial thought here is that maybe you ought to give yourself a little time to adjust before you change them out. They're not really so very difficult to work with after a little practice. It just takes a bit of time to develop a touch. (think "pinch" as opposed to "twist")
Why spend money to change something not broken that functions quite well otherwise?

$75?! You can buy another uke with that!

Friction tuners really aren't so bad, as long as you keep the screw at a comfortable tightness and get really good at turning the pegs in very tiny increments. But if you really would prefer geared,

http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tuners/Ukulele/Grover_Ukulele_Tuning_Machines.html

Ten bucks, great quality, and easy to install yourself!

I agree with Lanark - try them out for a while. I used to think I wouldn't like them, then I got a uke with them and now I want to change all my geared ones to friction.

Rhymenocerous said:

Hi everyone,
I was hoping someone could give me some help with this. I have only owned ukes with geared tuners until today. I got my new Bushman and it has the peg tuners. I was wondering where the cheapest place to buy quality tuners might be and how hard it would be to install them. If it is too hard to install them anyone have ideas on where to get it done near San Francisco? And how much it would cost? I got an estimate today for $75 just for labor and I thought they were joking. Hopefully someone knows something better. I was hoping to pay half that! Thanks!:shaka:

Click to expand...

That estimate sounds way off. I bought some open geared Grover tuners at Dusty Strings in Seattle. I wanted to replace the friction tuners on my G-string soprano. They were gonna charge 20 dollars to install them, I didn't want to spend twenty bucks and have to wait, so I managed to figure out how to install them myself. It was kind of fun project, but a little tricky to do it exactly right, and also I had to use my swiss army knife instead of a file to route out the holes, to make them a little bigger. The tuners themselves were only about 18 dollars.
I think the difficulty of installing them could depend on your particular situation. But I don't know why it should be take so long that luthiers would want to charge $75. I think for a pro it might only take 20 minutes or a half hour.

Putting in new seled gear tuners isn't that hard.

You can buy a wood reamer for less than $20 to make your peg holes a little bigger. Most good hardware stores will probably sell them.
http://www.cvfsupplycompany.com/retahare2pse.html


Mainland sells sealed gear tuning pegs. http://shop.mainlandukuleles.com/product.sc?categoryId=5&productId=17

So that's about half price to do it yourself even if you have to buy the tool.