Hiya,
I have a wonderful Bryan Carver Mountain Banjo I built some time back.
The tuning pegs won't stay put. Is there an easy fix other than making or buying larger diameter pegs?
Tom
The usual recommendations include peg dope, which you can find at a violin shop, or chalk. If those don't work, it may be time for pegs if they no longer fit well. In that case, if you're not into carving pegs, you could again see what the violin shop has in terms of violin, viola, or larger pegs.
Chalk? Technique?
Chalk the peg part thats going on the inside of the peg hole. Just a little bit goes a long way.
Another option that I use is to rub a little ‘dry’ soap from a bar of soap onto the peg spread it around evenly in its slot, then use talcum powder to get the right resistance. This works the same or even better than the peg paste you can buy.
This thread should be moved to the 'building, repair, and setup' forum.
That said, violin-style pegs can work wonderfully with gut or synthetic strings, but they first have to be correctly fitted, and do need an application of some kind of "dope" or lubricant applied occasionally. My usual is Lava soap.
Your pegs may well need to be re-fitted, even if they were done perfectly to begin with. A new neck is going to change shape as it settles in, and the peg holes only have to go microscopically out-of-round to become a real pretty near useless.
Turn the pegs in the hole with the strings off. Do they turn smoothly or is there a (slight) yump, yump, yump feel to them? Look at the shaft of the peg that is actually in the hole. Does the shaft show a uniformly shiny band or is it more like, shiny, dull, shiny dull. If it yumps or is not consistently shiny, the peg (or hole) is not uniform. The pegs will need to be refitted.
