Official Luthiers Forum!

I called Grover today about some grovers I wanted replaced and spoke with "Chuck" who was very helpful. I mentioned about all the problems people have had with the Grover V97 18:1 gold tunners and he informed me the problem has been corrected. According to him the problem was not on the overseas side of thing but on the US end. Most of the problems were being found with the Sloted headstock ones but here is what he said was happening as I understand him. The tunners were being built and assembled properly over seas but they had problems with not enough of certain tunners (mainly the slotted) so they were switching the posts on them by hand in the US (putting slotted headstock posts into peghead tunners and vise versa. It turns out the two are not interchangeable. He tells me that all the ones that had probles were ones assembled by hand in the US which they are not doing anymore. Sounds like the demand for these was greater than they expected and they made a bad call. Anyway I have a couple of the new sets comming from them to try out. Hopefully these will be back up to the quality they orriginally were as I really liked the first batch I had and only had trouble with the last bunch I ordered. Just thought I'd pass this on.

so how much "stock" is out there, and how can you tell the difference?

I remember Matt trying a set of Grovers. He noticed that the tuner screw slots were boogered. And soon I saw that he'd made the switch to Waverly's. Frank Ford was right once again, people expect the best when they go out shopping for a handmade guitar. I like the way Collings says it this way, "Waverleys is all we use, what more can I say?"

Of course the Gotoh are really nice closed tuners.

Richard, I talked to Chuck today on some Titan Bass tuners. When I brought up the V97's he mentioned a guy in Canada having trouble. When I called your name he said, yep, that's the guy. I'm checking my Grovers tomorrow. Thanks for the info, he said the same to me. Bad move for Grover, live and learn.

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http://www.dickeyguitars.com

I have used the Gotoh open tunners but liked the first Grovers I got much better. At this point I am starting to push waverly's but am thinking I might still offer the Grovers for those who want them. Once I started checking the gold ones I found the bad ones were sloppy and noticable but the first couple of batches I got were so nice I stopped checking. I've also learned. I have two sets of gold grovers out there on guitars on tunners that came from the bad batches I bought and they sound like they are starting to have trouble too.

Be careful if you try the Waverlys. Once I used them I just couldn't use anything else...and I got a good set of Grovers on my first guitar! The rest have all been Waverlys.

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JJ
Napa, CA
http://www.DonohueGuitars.com

I Made the move over to Waverleys for my open backed tuners, and have to say the quality is very different.

I have them on an instrument I was using to demo to prespective customers a few weeks ago and I think all but one person commented how nice they were, I have also found that customers don't mind paying the extra for them. In fairness to the grovers I think they are great value, but as Mario said when we discussed this before " If you want a reputation for making quality guitars you need quality tuners" I argued with him at the time, but you know what, he was right.

I tried lots of tuners. I was lucky with the 18/1's but I too switched to Waverleys. Good luck
john