Wittner Violin Tuning Pegs 4/4 7,8

These Wittner Tuning Pegs are fabulous. They have no effect on the sound of the instrument and make tuning so easy and accurate. With a modern instrument where the peg box is cut to the correct taper fitting should be really simple, (although you may need a tapered hole router to help trim the hole for correct peg positioning. Trim and polish the ends with a Dremel Drill or similar). This is really easy and no where near as difficult as it sounds. Just go slow and steady. I fitted the pegs in my son's vintage violin with no trouble at all. Older hand made instruments with non standard tapers will need the holes re-cut but the effort is worth it. In this case it may be better to go for the larger diameter Tuning Pegs as I did (Wittner Violin Tuning Pegs 4/4 8,6) Any reasonably careful DIY person will be able to fit these pegs. As a bonus when you have the pegs fitted you can now fit a new high quality tail piece without the fine tuning adjusters (you won't need them anymore) that are deleterious to your violin's sound.

I purchased those to fit my Yamaha YEV-104 strung with Infeld Red.

At the first glance, it looks like those pegs are too big for this violin.
It's however not the case, and those pegs fits very well on the YEV without the need to enlarge the peg holes.
Simply insert them, push them till the shaft is in correct position, mark on the peg where the outer edge of the peg box is, and get the dremel out !
The material is super easy to cut/grind and can later on be sanded to have a perfect finish.
It takes a bit of time, but it totally worth it.

I wanted to try those pegs to get rid of fine tuners on my tailpiece.
After an initial setup, it appears that indeed, it's super easy to tune the violin without fine tuners for G,D,A.
However for E, it's a bit tricky and I'm not sure that on the long run I would be able to skip the fine tuner for this string.
Even a very light turn of the peg can bring the E string slightly out of tune.
Infeld Red are coming with gold steel E, may be with another E string/another material this problem would be non existant.

My YEV and myself are very happy with this product !

I don't know why these have taken so long to come to the market, they are nothing short of revolutionary. I've put them on an inexpensive electric violin and they've changed the instrument.

They're very easy to install, you just push them firmly into the peg holes in the pegbox so they don't slip and you're away. Wind the strings on and it's as easy as that. They help keep tuning stable and make accurate tuning really easy. No slipping or sticking and tuning is now so easy.

The only thing to mention is that winding the strings on to the pegs is a bit of an ordeal, as you have to work through the fairly slow gearing (I think it's 8:1 so 8 turns of the head turns the shaft once). The stringer resistance of the gearing mechanism can add to the time needed to string up. This is always going to be difficult to balance as you either get good fine-tunable movement or faster string wind-on. It's not really a criticism as such, I think Wittner have got the balance about right but it's something to mention if you have weaker hands.

I'm not sure about the time to settle in on these as I changed the tailpiece at the same time as I installed these. I think the tailpiece needed to stretch out and settle in, which took maybe 3 or 4 weeks. It would slightly lose tuning overnight, but never while I was playing. Now everything has settled down, the tuning stability is really good.

I would definitely recommend these as an addition to any beginner's instrument. I can sense that some owners of expensive antique instruments might be reluctant to switch over to these, but they are a completely reversible upgrade and worth trying out.