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In a pinch slipping pegs can be stopped by a couple lines of chalk down the shaft of the peg, then reinstall, twist around a few times before adding the string. Don't mix pegs and holes i.e. do one at a time. The chalk introduces some friction.
Then you need to run down and get some "peg dope" from a violin or stringed instrument repair shop or the like.
Could be it time for a pro tuneup which you can get at the stringed instrument repair shop. Most generic guitar places won't have any experience with friction pegs.
Try the chalk cause I'm betting you have some around then get some peg dope. You might bring your guitar and have them show you how to dope one up. Same thing though, draw a line but the dope is like a gummy crayon that doesn't exactly draw a neat line. I like to dope,the peg then twist it around in the bore working it in a handful of turns each way applying a little pressure to seat it nicely. Once I string it up same thing, work it in and pushing up into the bore, but carefully, only enough to hold the string tension. Seems to take a playing session or two before they seat well and I find a second application on a new headstock is usually required.
Some times a big change in humidity can cause them to get cranky.
Pegs do take a certain amount of finesse and could be that visit to the string repair shop and asking for some hands on advise would help.
At some point a compleat repair will be in order: holes bushed and new pegs fit. You could do it at home if you are skilled but by the time you gathered up the tools and worked around the learning curve you most likely could have paid to have four guitars repegged?
I've built more then a handful of peg head guitars but this is my only experience so others might have a few better ideas.
HR
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I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
After careful observation, I decided that I better let a pro handle it. Contacted http://miguelantonio.com/repairs.html and he will repair the issues with the pegs. While he takes care of that, he is going to look at a couple of other minor issues.
Make sure it's the pegs and not the strings slipping. I drill a 1.5mm hole for bottom E, A, and G. 1mm for D, B and top E. Everything that the guys above have said applies. If you dont already have a reamer and peg shaper that you use anyway - take to a violin/proper string shop. Good luck.
Another alternative for pegs is to get mechanical ones fitted.
My first Stephen Eden guitar (2018) had wooden pegs, and I think as pegs go they were good, but after a year of fighting with tuning at dance classes and playing in a restaurant I decided to try Wittner mechanical pegs:
I liked them so much, both for tuning convenience and light weight that I opted for them again on the guitar he made me earlier this year. Although they are heavier than plain wooden pegs, they are half the weight of machine heads.
Only downside is they are (obviously) more expensive than wooden pegs. Just a suggestion.
The pegs dry out ( even more than from being properly seasoned sometimes) or they wear unevenly because of grain direction. They can become untrue, ever so subtly oval shaped in cross section. This is one main reason why they get funky and refuse to turn. A professional needs to evaluate the pegs to see if this is part of the problem. They have to remedy this condition with a little careful reshaving of the peg to true it back up.
Then there are conditions in the hole in the headstock, maybe the fit has worn a bit because of grain direction. There are lots of things that can go out of true.
Home remedies that are made up in place of a good peg dope can mess up the pegs and then they need to be cleaned. Wax is a very bad idea and the talc /soap Remedies are stop gap measures. Soap and talc are not ideal.
Peg dope is made from various secret formulations of powdered graphite, super fine clay, and some binder that could possibly include a type of wax. Each company that makes peg dope has a proprietary mixture and these are kept as industrial secrets.
If your pegs are difficult to turn and sticky, a good peg dope from Hill & Sons or Pirastro etc will be the best remedy. But if you don’t have any the next best thing is to rub a very soft B series pencil on the peg shaft and lubricate it with graphite, then when you finally get your fancy peg dope it’s not going to complete with whatever junk was put on them before.
The idea with peg dope is that it coats the inside of the hole in the headstock and gives a lubricated sleeve of graphite and fillers to create a burnished polished interior surface for the peg to turn in. Adding other junk is a maybe a short term solution, but good quality peg dope is engineered to do that job better.
If for example you wanted to make something like a regular peg dope preparation one would do worse than this :
Cut about a 6 or 7 mm off the end of an oil pastel made for art, crush it up on a hard surface. Add some powdered graphite by rubbing a soft pencil lead on some fine sandpaper. When you get a small pile of graphite powder, add it to the crushed pastel and mix them up. You could even put it in a spoon and hold a match under it for 8 seconds to get the pastel soft enough to blend ( refrain from shooting it up) then let it cool. That’s something that approximately resembles peg dope.
I don’t know why anyone would bother with homemade remedies when a stick of Hill’s Violin peg paste works so well and lasts for years. I have only needed to use it once a year on three guitars with well-fitting pegs.
I only ever had one problem with my pegs on a gig 200 miles from home. The turning end of one of the pegs snapped off. I got some pliers from my car toolkit and had to retune by gripping the remaining stub with them
Someone brought me a 1972 Ramirez flamenco and asked if I could help. It had every problem that Stephen mentioned plus a few more acquired through amateur meddling. The pegs where very short after attempts to re-profile them and the holes. As the butchery progressed the pegs got pushed further and further through the holes. The ends had been cut off (including what would have been the MOP inlay on the ends. The pegs were waisted! They rocked from side to side in the holes.
I recommended an experienced luthier who re-bushed the holes and fitted new pegs with MOP dots at the end to be in keeping with what would have been there originally.
Sorry to hijack the post but it's kind of related.
I am toying with the idea of replacing my wooden pegs with mechanical pegs (Peghed) from Chuck Herin for the reasons Mark said above. Witnner looks a bit plasticy.
The price is not too bad but the postage cost will push up the price significantly :( It doesn't seem to be a very big task provided that one has the tool (a reamer) and it's done very carefully (luthiers please feel free to advise me otherwise).
I don't have a reamer and thought for a one-off job, it's not worth investing in one. Chuck recommended someone here in London who'd do it at an inexpensive cost! I rang him yesterday. He is asking £200-£250 to do it . I think he's having a laugh! That is more than the cost of the pegs+postage.
Are you sure he isn’t including the cost of the peghead tuners in that? I’ve done this job and it’s not a big deal. As you said, the cost of the reamer means it’s not economical to do a one-off at home and it’s also not a good idea to tackle this kind of work if you don’t have experience, but £250? Gimme a break.
It might be worth asking him for clarification. If that’s truly his install cost then I’m certain you could find someone capable who would be willing to do it for a far more reasonable price.
Not really... here a pic to compare. I kept the wooden pegs on my 2018 Stephen Eden blanca, and bought a couple of sets of the Wittner pegs, so here is a brand new set of Wittner pegs with the old wooden pegs to compare how they look.
Also re price, ask Steve for a quote, he has the right reamer, I know cos he bought one to do mine!
EDIT: this pic was taken from about 12 inches/30cm, and they don't look too different to me, apart fromt he shiny shaft of the wooden pegs where I slavered on HILLS PEG DOPE every freakin time I changed strings!
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Steven Eden replaced the wooden pegs on my Anders with pegheds for only £25, he did an amazing job I preferred the look of the pegheds to the witner ones as they don’t look as chubby to me The pegheds look almost identical to the wooden ones they replaced and are simple to use
ORIGINAL: estebanana RobJe, did you like that I added as a public health announcement, refrain from shooting peg dope?
When Guitar Solo was still on Clement street, it was just around the corner from Kabuto, the best sushi place in San Francisco. My girlfriend and I stopped in before dinner. The two young men behind the counter were students at the Conservatory. One of them was tuning up a peg head guitar. One of the pegs kept slipping. He said, " Too much dope."
The other one replied, "That seems to be a frequent problem for you."
I got tired of the rosewood pegs on my '67 Ramirez and had machines put on it by Kenny Hill's shop, up in the Santa Cruz mountains, some time in the early 1990s. While I lived in Palo Alto I had taken it to Gryphon to have it done. Frank Ford came out of the back room and lectured me about "preserving the character of the instrument." I told him Jose III himself had offered to do the job, but I never had the guitar in Madrid to get it done. I wish I had known about Pegheds and Wittners.
Ah yes, the anti peg dope party. It's ok, we can go back to the 1930's in Spain when to own soap was a luxury.
There was a time when guitarists used pencils and rubber bands to fashion impromtu an cejilla, but eventually cejillas were mass produced and you didn't have to depend on that ornate carved wood cejilla with the little peg that always came unwound in the middle of a solo.
Guitarists used to use soap and some corn starch powder to coat oval shaped pegs, and how authentic and fun it was, said nobody who had to put up with it. Peg dope was a snobby that classical violinists used anyway, and it was hard to find because you had to go to an upscale violin shop to buy it. And the shame, the shame f being a guitarist, much worse a flamenco guitarist, who would undoubtedly be treated like a lower caste subhuman rubbish collector.
Yep, rubber band & pencil cejillas and bar soap with baby powder, yes lets go back to that era because its so romantic, and every drop flamenco snob purism counts to make us legit.
Let's just over look the fact that there is a specialty product to do the exact job of luburcating wood guitar pegs, because what are facts anyway? Just annoyances thrown out by liberal weenies to trip up real men who would never use a paste on their pegs that looks like a lipstick. Or wear a mask because it saves lives.
No siree, lets keep using the half baked trick that guitarists of yore used, because we don't want to be identified with actual products made for the purpose when we can posture and use some throwback substance that people used 60 years ago, but cause it was hard to get pegdope or lipstick.
Yes, that's exactly why I'm considering Pegheds although Wittner would work out much cheaper for me.
John, if you don't mind me asking, did you buy yours directly from Chuck and had them shipped to the UK? According to Chuck, Conde stocks his pegs too but I couldn't find them on their website!
I just had a quick look online and only found a few pics, but they look pretty much like the Wittners to me
and btw the pic in my post further back up the thread of the wooden pegs and Wittner pegs together was taken from about 12 inches/30cm, and they don't look too different to me, apart fromt he shiny shaft of the wooden pegs where I slavered on HILLS PEG DOPE every freakin time I changed strings!
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Wittner seems to have their logo on the shaft or at the bottom of the grip which I don't like (can you please confirm since you already have them).
Also the grip seems to show a seam between the two halves which makes it look a bit plasticy in my opinion. I'm only judging by the photos that I can see on the web; obviously you know better since you already have them.
Peghed comes in two grip versions; ebony (actual wood) which is slightly dearer and composite hand finished. So in either case it doesn't have the seam that I'm talking about.
Also, Wittner is 4mm shorter than my existing pegs and the hole should be reamed to 9.5mm which means a bit more reaming.
It's ok, we can go back to the 1930's in Spain when to own soap was a luxury.
Our forbears knew how to use pegs properly – a little bit of wax or soap to make them move freely , some powder to make them stay put. This is now a lost art. Nobody has the patience to experiment carefully to get it just right.
Peg paste is designed to do the two important jobs for the pegs – make them turn easily and make them hold. An idiot can achieve good results with sparely applied paste on properly fitting pegs.
Now a question. I have a Manuel Bellido with nice pegs – comparatively thin making them good for accurate tuning. There are rosewood faceplates on the front and back of the head. Is this good idea for pegheads?
Yes, that's exactly why I'm considering Pegheds although Wittner would work out much cheaper for me.
John, if you don't mind me asking, did you buy yours directly from Chuck and had them shipped to the UK? According to Chuck, Conde stocks his pegs too but I couldn't find them on their website!
Thanks, A
yes I bought them directly from Chuck, it was pretty smooth experience, and he seems like a nice guy. it was more expensive than the wittners especially with delivery and duty but they are a really nice product, i have no regrets
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