Duffy
New Member
With the reamer you will notice that it is a sort of cone shaped boring tool. You stick it in from the back of the tuner and "gently" turn it with hand force. It is very sharp and will "ream" out the post hole very gradually. You then test the tuner and see if it will fit thru the hole and seat correctly. If not you ream a little more. You may need to ream from the top of the head stock as well in order to open up the post hole properly. When the tuners fit thru, as well as the bushings, you are done.
I like the bolt on bushings because they hold the tuner tightly to the guitar. I don't like the post wobbling around. It seems like some vintage style tuners have some "play" between the post and the push in bushing/grommet.
Drilling out the post holes is a drastic decision to make and can easily result in the drill bit ripping off some of that nice finished wood on the top of the headstock. The drill bit is just very aggressive and crude as it bores thru the post hole, thereby often "ripping" the wood around where the drill bit comes thru the wood, top or bottom. This is obviously something to avoid and is the reason why reamers are used instead of drill bits. The reamers gently open up the post holes without tearing. If the reamer was going to tear at the wood you would feel it with your hand and be able to compensate, plus the end coming thru the other side is not as large as the post hole itself, so you are applying cutting force directly "into" the post hole, not "pushing" out of the post hole with only two cutting edges on a drill bit. The reamer has several cutting edges compared to two cutting edges on a drill bit - therefore you can see that a drill bit does its boring in a much more crude way. I like to use finely gradated tools when working on nice guitars.
