Steinberger KB Tremolo

From EpiWiki

== Steinberger KB Tremolo ==
Manufacturer	Steinberger
Period	1986-1988

The Steinberger KB Tremolo is a locking tremolo designed by Ned Steinberger and commonly used on Epiphone solid body guitars during the 1980s. It is U.S. Patent No. 4,632,004 which was filed on January 31, 1985. The date the patent was issued is December 30, 1986. It expired January 31, 2005.

The credited inventor is Ned Steinberger and the assignee to the patent is Steinberger Sound Corporation of Newburgh, NY.

Design

The KB tremolo was designed "to minimize friction in a tremolo device that includes components that are easy to maintain and replace." In other words, their objective was to create a tremolo that can be easily and quickly assembled and disassembled and mounted onto the body of a stringed instrument (such as a guitar) as a "self-contained unit" to obtain the desired action. These, they claimed, were the major flaws of all previous tremolo designs.

However the design of the KB is flawed in a different way. There are two posts that screw into the base plate to hold the tremolo in place. The thread on the posts is not long enough to reach the base plate because of two pedestals that surround the holes in the base plate and are equal to the length of the thread on the posts. This causes it to bend the pedestals that keep the posts in place. This can only be remedied by cutting off the pedestals, creating new, taller pedestals (preferably out of a stronger metal), and screwing them straight into the base plate. To learn how to go about doing this, see: http://www.meissner-dokuteam.de/Files/Steinberger_KB_Trem_01_small.pdf

Figure 1 shows the upper subassembly of the tremolo and Figure 2 shows the lower subassembly (Please note the design shown is not the same design that was used when the tremolo went into production, it is only shown to give a general idea of how the tremolo works).