Six simple steps to restring your Floyd Rose
by Lucas Travers
If you own or have recently aquired an instrument with a floyd rose tremolo system, they can be one of the trickiest electric guitars to restring but in this handy step by step guide, we’ll show you that its not as hard as it may first appear and with just a few simple tools you’ll be whammy-ing and dive-bombing again to your hearts content!
What you’ll need:
• Neck Support
• New Strings
• Rag to put under your Bridge
• Clippers/String Winder
• Allen Key that came with your guitar.
Follow our step-by-step guide below!
Out with the old…
Step 1: Take your Allen Key and Loosen off the 3 Lock Nuts at the top of your fretboard. Turning the screws anti-clockwise to loosen them. Then take a rag and place it under the Floyd Rose Bridge by simply “Dive Bombing” and then placing the rag underneath.
Step 1. – Get a cloth under the bridge to stop it falling down.
Step2: Now with the Bridge supported we want to take off all the strings. So, with your String winder loosen off your machine heads to make it nice and easy to remove the strings. Then grabbing your Allen Key, you want to Dive Bomb the bridge again and loosen (Anti clockwise) of all 6 Clamps holding the strings in. Now remove the old strings.
..In with the new!
Step 3: Time to put on the new strings, firstly you want to cut the ball end off your string. Then place it into the bridge, dive bomb bridge and tighten the clamp up to hold the string in. Repeat this for all 6 Strings.
Step 4: Now all the Strings are nice and tight in the bridge we want to wind them on to the machine heads. Starting with the low E we want to slide the strings under the Nut and String Tree and trim that String about 1 ½ poles away from the machine head we are winding it onto (as pictured). Now repeat for all 6.
Step 5: Now slide the through the hole of the respective machine heads and wind them on using your string winder tool. Now repeat for all 6.
Step 6: Remove the rag from under the bridge and tune all strings up to concert E tuning. You may want to over pitch them a little to allow for more play with your fine tuners. Once you have done that and your bridge is now lying nice and flush with the body of the guitar go ahead and tighten up the 3 lock nuts.
Step 6. Tune up – make sure to tune with machine heads before locking down nuts.
The Fine tune
Step 7: You now need to retune the guitar using your fine tuners on the bridge of your guitar. Once you have the guitar in tune you are ready to rock!
