Why Do Acoustic Bridge Pins Pop Out or Keep Pulling Up?
Have you ever experienced this before? You’re tightening up your fresh new acoustic string and notice the bridge pin keeps creeping up, or maybe it even pops right out!
Why is this happening?
For the most part, the root of the problem stems from the bottom of the pin itself. It’s squared off and acts like a catch for the string’s ball end.
While this is certainly a main cause for bridge pins popping out, the entire problem stems from a couple of reasons – often combined.
The other issue is typically caused by the heaviest strings. Their greater thickness often binds against the bridge pin hole making it difficult for them to seat at all. In such cases, the solution is to either widen the bridge pin slot or enlarge the bridge pin hole.
Why is this still happening when it seems to be a common problem?
As with any guitar problem, it takes time for solutions to become the accepted norm. For instance, it wasn’t that long ago that pickup systems for acoustics didn’t include an integrated tuner, now it’s commonplace. Of course this is still not the absolute rule, but looking further back in guitar history, there was a time when there were no such things as electronic tuners at all – get my meaning?
For the time being, many manufacturers are still using common bridge pins that are squared off on the bottom. You’ll see them on highly recognized brand-name instruments (maybe you own one?) and even custom designed high-end replacement pins.
In this video, I run through the more common, and easier methods of getting the bridge pins to cooperate.
Video: How to Stop Bridge Pins from Popping Out
Transcript:
Hey all, Steve from GuitarNiche here. I’m just about to restring this lovely Seagull Entourage acoustic – very nice very nice, few years old, and as a cursory nice thing to do for the person that owns it, I noticed that the ends of these bridge pins, all of which are right here are all squared off – they’re just mass-produced plastic bridge pins.
What I’m going to do is well for one, take one of our new strings and and pop it in there and give you an idea what might happen.
Rightaway you’ll see that it’s pulling up on on the pin. Two things going on there. I’m going to address one at a time.
The pin itself: what I’ll do is simply chamer the edge here at the slot. Now I have to do this off camera so I don’t make a mess on the guitar. I’m just taking my file, you can do this on a grinder or you can do it with sandpaper, whatever works. But I’ll show you what I did very quickly, all I did there was just knock off that square edge it’s super simple.
I’ve heard people complaining about the bridge pins coming up when they’re tightening strings and it’s very common. Especially when you don’t know what the forces are behind it. It’s totally normal to ask questions and try to figure it out. Well, here’s your answer to help alleviate the problem of bridge pins pulling up. But, as you’re tightening up the strings it’s still not 100% guaranteed.
if you want to help things along a little bit take the end of the string here where it’s wound, and I’ve seen this happen even with chamered pins where the ball still gets hung up. Just because everything’s still at right angles.
What I’m going to do is put a little bit of a (hope that’s on camera there) I’ll put a little bit of a kink in that, just roll the ball over a little bit. Then I’ll pop that in and put the pin in, pull up a little bit. Push it down with my thumb if I have to.
By the time I get that wound up (I’m just going to do this super quick) just to give a little bit of tension and explain that because of those two small tiny little adjustments it’s done.
Okay you see it’s still coming up, but I’ll just push that down easy peasy. But the important thing is that it’s not the whole thing being drawn up.
Sometimes they’ll pop right out and then they’ll land and Never Never Land and, you know, have fun finding it.
Anyway I will do that for each string in turn but there’s your little tip for the day so to speak, actually two for one.
Hope you enjoyed that and we’ll we’ll carry on, get the job done.
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As always play loud and have a great day.
Cheers!