If you’ve owned a guitar for longer than 5 minutes you’ll know that at some point your strap buttons will work their way loose, the favourite home remedy for this involves matchsticks usually. The reason it happens in the first place is that wood isn’t a suitable home for such small screws when they’re load bearing. Typical strap pin screws are only 3mm or 3.5mm in diameter, and two of these are asked to hold the weight of a guitar that can be up to 10lbs, and to also cope with it being bounced around at the same time. Even the hardest of woods will compress and get chewed up by the screw moving around eventually.
This is an M4 screw (M stands for machine, 4 means 4mm diameter):
These are mostly useless for wood due to the fine threads, but are exceptional for use with machined metal inserts like these:
That insert is 5mm wide with 1mm blades threaded into the wood, not only does this provide much more surface area than a regular screw but should any movement occur then the screw will simply loosen inside the insert and can be tightened up again with no damage to the wood itself. However, due to the fine thread on a machine screw these can be tightened very securely indeed, and with some Loctite threadlocker added to the mix it will never come loose again.
All of my guitars come with this as standard, and I’m offering the mod on customer instruments for £15. It’s a worthwhile consideration for professional players or anyone who spends a lot of time with their guitar on a strap.
