The first professional quality self-tuning mechanism for guitar appeared in the mid-1980’s and was promoted by Jimmy Page, but, given the technology of the time, it was big, like giving your Les Paul a heart-and-lung transplant. Now, 30 years later, a wonderful compact self-tuning system out of Germany, made by the company Tronical, can be bought off the shelf and installed by anyone with the only required tool being the little wrench shown here, where the system is installed on a Ridgewing self-tuning headstock.

This headstock was originally shipped on a guitar with an experimental side-action lever, where the lever was carbon-fiber with a molded-in contact surface of 3D printed stainless steel, designed to combine light weight with a robust working contact surface. Well, it was light-weight all right, but it turned out so was the 3D-printed “stainless steel” part. All of the string tension was carried from the headstock to the neck by a very small contact surface of just a couple of square millimeters between the headstock lever and a central push pin (see below), and if you do the math, only some pretty serious metal could withstand the pressure without deforming or spalling. It was decided to replace the original lever with one made of titanium, designed and made by Bill Daly, a wizard guitarmaker and engineer with top-secret clearance designing magic black boxes for the military. Here are some pictures of the operation.

The Ridgewing guitar uses a lot of screws, but they are good ones and the overall design is pretty simple, so you can confidently take things apart and put them back together on your kitchen table. The little Tronical wrench at the top was all that was needed to remove the self-tuning system into its basic parts – the black control box and six servo-enabled tuners and hardware bits. You would think that such a silly little wrench could not possibly be the product of state-of-the-art German engineering, but it was actually designed that way so that it would be just about impossible for an over-enthusiastic guitar owner to over-tighten the tuners.

The self-tuning headstock has just four parts – the body, here molded in carbon-fiber, the lever, the push-pin, and the back cover plate, shown below. In this picture are shown the original carbon-fiber lever mechanism and its titanium replacement. To remove the mechanism you turn over the headstock, and the parts just fall out. You don’t even have to shake it.

Putting in the new lever and push-rod takes just a few seconds and some lithium grease.

Then you pop the cover plate back on, replace the dozen or so screws, put the Tronical system back on using that silly little idiot-proof lever, and you are ready to go.