Hi Robert, Centering the drill is easy enough, a quick smack with the appropriate punch will do the job. Easy outs usally take care of the removal, but once in a while you end up having to do some major surgery. I've had to once drill out the whole darned thing with a just undersized drill bit, and then carefully bend the rest of the agraffe away from the plate threads. No fun. Using old strings... yes.. this is done all the time. You may break one or two from all the winding/unwinding of the coils. Sometimes the break is at the becket leaving enough string to still get on the pin.. sometimes not. But re-useing the bass strings perse is no problem bty... as long as Agraffes are up.... Great article in the Journal this month on polishing. Looks impressive as heck. Only question I have is the profile inside that ends up being formed. Anyone have any comparisons / comments on this compared to reaming ? Cheers RicB In addition, I also wonder how one goes about centering the drill for the easy-out on the remains of the old agraffe so that threads in the plate are not damaged. Should I expect to mess them up and just commit to going up from the current 7/32" size to the 1/4" size agraffe by re-tapping the plate? And even if I don’t mess up the threads, it is usual to run a tap through them anyway just to clean them up before the new agraffe is installed? Finally, I managed to remove the old bass strings without cutting them by straightening them just enough to slide through the old agraffe, so that maybe I could re-use the old bass strings. Is that a reasonable expectation? Robert Scott Ypsilanti, Michigan
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