I'm looking at changing the machine heads of my USA Standard Strat to the vintage style ones. I've purchased some Fender Vintage Machine Heads( code:0992040000)

I realise that i'll have to make a small screw hole in the headstock to secure the vintage ones but How do I take the current ones off - Does the back of the sealed unit pop off somehow to unsrew anything?

Thanks in advance....

You will also need some "conversion bushings" to do this as well. The holes in the headstock are larger in diameter than the holes for vintage tuners, and the bushings that come with the vintage tuners are too small. The "conversion bushings" fill up the larger hole; you can get them at Stewart Macdonald and many other places; I think they have both metric and standard but you would need standard.

To take the modern tuners off - you just unscrew the bolt on the front of the headstock; then they should just drop off.

The Floyd Rose Classics came with vintage tuners.

Thanks,

I'll be a bit annoyed if I have to buy additional bushings as I specifically looked into that before purchase, according to the place i've ordered them they sell them as :

"Set of 6 Genuine Fender replacement machine heads for your Stratocaster or Telecaster.

Includes all necessary mounting hardware, bushes and screws.

Genuine Fender American Vintage machine head guitar tuners"

Fingers crossed I guess.

Danocaster80,

I believe that "replacements" indicate that you are replacing like tuners, and this doesn't apply if your tuners are different. Except maybe the possibility of more than one set of bushings included to cover any type of tuners.

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True, could be that. I'll report back once they've arrived.

What shimmilou said is correct -- the bushings that come with the tuners are normal bushings, so when you replace a set of tuners you can replace the existing bushings at the same time. That way the wear/patina will match -- you won't have bright shiny tuners and dull rusty bushings. The bushings that come with the tuners are much smaller in diameter than the tuner holes in the headstock.

Fender doesn't sell conversion bushings. You have to get them from an aftermarket supplier like Stewart-MacDonald or Guitar Parts Resource. Fender generally doesn't support/encourage mods that require drilling holes or other irreversible mods -- they don't want to be responsible if someone cracks a headstock or something like that. They intend for their "replacement tuners" to be exactly that -- exact replacements for existing stock tuners.

Well, as usual, i've screwed! You guys are correct. The bushings that came with the vintage tuners are too small for my US Standard.

It seems that I need some other bushings that will fit the tuning peg hole a bigger diameter for instance.

Can anybody suggest where I might get hold of the correct parts (in the UK)?

I have found the following on axesrus.co.uk......would these work?
6.3mm shaft hole x8.6mm wide Splined Historic Push in Bushes for 6mm Machine head posts. PER 6

Thanks in advance guys and sorry for being a schmuck!

Probably not! You need bushings for 10mm holes and for 6mm shafts.
I don't know anybody in GB but check out THOMANN in Germany. They have them!
There's also ALLPARTS replacement adapter bushings on *Bay.

Standard tuners have 10mm holes, vintage tuners have 8.3mm holes.
That means, the ones you just posted would be too thin, you need a bigger outer diameter.

I'm looking for the same bushings myself right now, to get rid of the standard tuners on a few of my strats.

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STRATS ROCK!!! but Teles and Firebirds, too!