: What mistakes have you made while restringing and setting up a Floyd Rose guitar? I have a Schecter Demon 6 with a floating Floyd Rose and this is my first time restringing it. I want to ask you guys for any headups, recommendations,

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What mistakes have you made while restringing and setting up a Floyd Rose guitar?

In 1990, I left some oil heating up in a frying pan in the kitchen, while doing up a Floyd Rose bridge in another room: not just re-stringing, but intonation.

Luckily, I had the ensuing fire put out before the firemen showed up.

Minor damage to a few cabinets, and a ceiling repaint. The intonation, as such, as fantastic though.

In terms of mistakes in the actual restringing and setup, I have one main regret: in younger years I used crappy strings with poor tuning stability. That not only wastes your time due to all the adjustment needed after the restringing and setup, but is bad for your hardware, because it requires too much fiddling with the tuners, as well as unlocking and re-locking of the locking nut, which wears down the parts.

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If you want an easy time, go one string at a time, and put the same type/gauge of string on it that you had before. Changes in string gauge/tension will require a bit of care to fix, like I recently answered here: Floyd Rose in Standard Tuning with .011 gauge strings

Aside from that, most Floyd Rose style bridges are not set up for ball end strings. That means you have to cut the ball end off to lock the string into the saddle's locking mechanism, and then cut the string to length on the headstock end. Take care with that step: measure twice, cut once! Don't leave yourself with a string that's too short to tune.

Also, I find it helps to reset all the fine tuning screws (they usually sit behind the saddles) to their midway point, before I get the tuning finalized and the nut locks back in place. It sucks to be "done", then realize you can't quite tune a string properly, and you don't have enough travel left on the fine screw to fix it. Allen wrenches back out, undo the nut locks, re-tune, etc.

There's a lot of moving parts in those Floyd Rose bridges. Try to think things through first before doing stuff: work smart, not hard.