Hated changing nylon strings until £5.49 later

Blaendulais

https://www.dropbox.com/s/68a9aoqzxzmez78/Winder.JPG?raw=1

steveledzep

Don't have any nylon strung, but a great gadget for steel strung too.

mart

Do you need a speed control on the screwdriver for that to work? My lecky screwdriver just has a “go” button and I can see the tuning pegs spinning round too fast for me to stop them before the string snaps.

steveledzep

I have the same Bosch screwdriver as in the picture and it is either stop or go.  The low speed of the driver and the gear ratio in the tuners make it easily controllable.  The 5 quid gadget becomes expensive if you have to buy the driver too though !

ICBM

If you fit the strings with the minimum amount of wrap on the barrels, which is also best for tuning stability, you don’t need these. I don’t even bother with a hand string winder usually, unless I’m taking off strings where too much wrap has been put on.

Stuckfast

Even with nylon strings? I've always found they take days and days to stabilise.

ICBM

Stuckfast said:

Even with nylon strings? I've always found they take days and days to stabilise.

They do, but a string winder doesn’t help with that either. It’s minimised if you put the least possible wrap on the barrels anyway.

When you fit the string, set the hole in the machinehead barrel parallel to the neck, poke the string through from the *far* side, then pull it tight and tie the loose end under the main part so the end is still pointing away from the bridge. The string should be tied to the barrel and not completely slack. Now tune it up, stretching it as you go.

You should be able to string and tune the guitar in about 10 minutes like that. It will still keep going flat for hours, that’s just what nylon strings do.

DrHankWangfordSnr

You can get nylon string with ball ends now.    No more endless........ minutes tying 6  knots.

Blaendulais

mart said:

Do you need a speed control on the screwdriver for that to work? My lecky screwdriver just has a “go” button and I can see the tuning pegs spinning round too fast for me to stop them before the string snaps.

Mine will spin slower if youre careful but you do have to be careful

Blaendulais

DrHankWangfordSnr said:

You can get nylon string with ball ends now.    No more endless........ minutes tying 6  knots.

! Bastardos

VimFuego

DrHankWangfordSnr said:

You can get nylon string with ball ends now.    No more endless........ minutes tying 6  knots.

these are great but I still always laugh at the term ball end.

Philtre

VimFuego said:

DrHankWangfordSnr said:

You can get nylon string with ball ends now.    No more endless........ minutes tying 6  knots.

these are great but I still always laugh at the term ball end.

Indeed. "bell end" would be better.

meltedbuzzbox

mart said:

Do you need a speed control on the screwdriver for that to work? My lecky screwdriver just has a “go” button and I can see the tuning pegs spinning round too fast for me to stop them before the string snaps.

Get yourself an impact driver and give it the beans

Grangousier

The way I was taught to do nylon strings is to push the string through, pull it as tight as possible then loop it around where the string goes in to the hole. There's a groove that runs around the inside of the peg hole, and you position the looped string in that, the tautened string holding it in place, then tune up. The tighter you can pull, the less winding is required, of course, but it's a lot more elegant and less faff than tying off the string. There's a steel-string version of the same thing (without the groove) that was discussed extensively on here.

Because I've mostly played nylon string, I've applied that principle to stringing my other  guitars most of my life - pulling the string as tight as possible, then tuning up, so that on the bass strings on electric guitars there are no windings at all, just the string poking through . Numerous people - most recently Jonathan at Feline - have expressed surprise that this has worked at all, and thinking about it it really shouldn't, but it always did. I'm getting into adding more windings above and below the string on electric now, though, if only to present a relatively normal face to the guitar tech world. 

One thing I learned from playing in the Guitar Craft tuning - A.K.A. New Standard Tuning, the Robert Fripp one, CGDAEG - is that the windings distribute the tension when the string is under high tension. The high G - usually an .011 tuned a minor third above the top string in regular tuning - would snap a lot for me until I learned to add a few more windings than I normally would.

I should get one of these things, though, if only because I like gadgets.