Not something I see everyday, this Hohner Steinberger came to me with the owner complaining that it wouldn’t hold it’s tuning after his son had been over enthusiastic with the trem.
On inspection I discovered that a locking lever was missing from the trem mechanism which I initially thought might have been the reason everything had gone out of whack. After a bit of research I found that the locking lever was there to help with string changing and that the guitar should function without it. In fact the owner told me that the guitar had been bought like this so this was a dead end.
I decided to strip the trem and re-assemble it so I could figure out what was going on and be confident that everything was doing what it should. These trems have a spring tension knob that can increase or decrease the spring tension to get the base plate to sit flat once the strings are at tension, this was obviously not setup correctly and was an easy fix. I also discovered that the saddles were free floating and are clamped in position by a single screw that wasn’t tight, so as the strings were tuned the saddles were just sliding around. I set the action to match the radius of the fret board, adjusted the intonation and locked them down.
