# DIY trem-stopper



## Xykhron (Sep 10, 2010)

Hi guys!

I've wondering about floyd upgrades. One of the most wanted by guitar players is the trem stopper, but they are expensive for what they do, so I decided to do it by myself. The result is a DIY trem stopper that cost me 2,90 &#8364;. This is my humble contribution...

I went to a hardware store, buy a little piece of metal  that we commonly use in our normal life. Went to house, pick up my Caparison Applehorn, marked the holes with a pen, then drilled them with a electric screwdriver, put the piece and tighten the screws.

The final "product" looks like this:











Do you know which little piece of metal is?  A clue: you have it on your doors. You "engage" it when you enter to the bathroom 

This "simple" piece has a ball inserted on the shaft that prevents accidental disengage due movements, so you can play securely. If you manual disengage it, the ball also acts pushing the shaft against the circular section of the "cap" and this avoids noises. Of course you can also glue some thin foam inside the "cap" to even make artificial friction to the shaft and have better isolation against noises, but I'd only do this to last part of the "cap" (the one that captures the shaft when disengaged), in order to have better sound vibration transmission when it acts as trem stopper


It works very well if you have only 3 springs instead of the four I have, because if you want to disable if, you only have to "disengage" it, .

Cheap solution that works and super-easy to install. Hope you'll find it helpfull

note: the screw between the big brass block and the body slippered when take the photo so is not supossed to be there and make no function, hehehehe


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## xtrustisyoursx (Sep 10, 2010)

Wow. I'm stunned by how effective this is, and the fact that no one has thought to do this before.


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## Xykhron (Sep 10, 2010)

Yeah..the same happened to me. I was thinking: "buhh, it will not work. No one tried this before, even when is sooooo simple idea, so for sure its a bad one". But I'm an experimental guy, so I decided to try it, and it works!


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## Jontain (Sep 10, 2010)

That looks pretty darn good man, how easy is it to acess the latch under the trem springs?


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## Xykhron (Sep 10, 2010)

With 4 springs is no easy at all. In fact, I must remove one of them to access, so I'd only recommend it if you have 3 or 2 springs only, so you can grab the latch easily


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## Xykhron (Sep 10, 2010)

but if you like the idea, you can cut the perpendicular shaft (the one that is under the springs) to make it shorter and have full access


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## Jontain (Sep 10, 2010)

I like it man, really simple idea but looks like it works well.


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## MaxOfMetal (Sep 10, 2010)

Great idea man! 

It reminds me a lot of something Ibanez and ESP made back in the late 80's. Those go for anywhere between $40 and $100 on eBay, but this is about the same thing.

Bravo.


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## EcoliUVA (Sep 10, 2010)

You, sir, get rep for this. I'm a mechanical engineer, and in my professional opinion this is fucking badass.

Now if I weren't scared to death of messing up my Jackson, I'd try it 

My Douglas SR-370, on the other hand...if I ever want to block it, I'll sure as hell give this a shot!


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## Xykhron (Sep 11, 2010)

thank you guys. I hardly tried it and works as it's supossed to be: fuller sound and less resonant that when disengaged


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## emperor_black (Sep 11, 2010)

Awesome! Many times I thought of using several long screws to hold the block in place but gave in and bought a tremol-no because I wanted to go between floating and fixed. This is a great idea. Bravo!


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## carcass (Nov 29, 2010)

thank you very much sir, this is the kind of idea i was looking for. I am definitely going to do something similar to my warlock, as soon as i will fix the bridge (one spring got loose and f*cked up the stability). But i am looking forward to do this little and very practical upgrade .. the stirng chancing should be very easy, like 5 minute work, right?


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## ev1ltwin (Nov 29, 2010)

...wow. this is amazing. thanks!


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## MaxOfMetal (Nov 29, 2010)

carcass said:


> thank you very much sir, this is the kind of idea i was looking for. I am definitely going to do something similar to my warlock, as soon as i will fix the bridge (one spring got loose and f*cked up the stability). But i am looking forward to do this little and very practical upgrade .. the stirng chancing should be very easy, like 5 minute work, right?



While it has the potential to make string changes faster, it's only blocking the trem from moving in a single direction, up. So depending on the spring tension, you will still have to block the trem from moving down while changing strings and tuning to make sure it doesn't wind up at too positive an angle.


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## anthonyferguson (Nov 29, 2010)

Frickin awesome idea man. Really clean job.


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## Prydogga (Nov 29, 2010)

You must have strong self confidence to apply a piece of bathroom/back door mechanism to a Caparison  Awesome idea man, I'd love to try it myself!


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## SirMyghin (Nov 29, 2010)

Best use of a dead bolt I have seen to date.


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