Help me restring my Floyd Rose tremelo before I smash it in half!

Cafe Society
1

Ok, I was gonna post this in GQ, but I figured that more guitar players will see it here. I have been playing for about 7 years and one of my guitars is an Ibanez with a Floyd Rose on it (which I hate with a passion) that I decided to restring for the first time a month ago. Well, like a dumbass I took off all 6 strings at one time. For anyone who has a FR trem they probably already see my problem. When I put the 6 new strings on it I could not get it to tune. The problem is that when I tighten the strings the bridge lifts up. So if I tune the low E then move across the neck to the high E, it puts all the other strings out of tune by a full step to a step and a half. So I go back and retune the low E and make my way across. Same thing happens. The damn bridge is lifting up so high that it is unplayable. its at an almost 45 degree angle to the body. Everytime I tighten a string it pulls the bridge up some more. The thing was working fine before I took off all the strings. I have restrung it before, but I did one string at a time. This time I took them all off because I wanted to clean around the pickups. Bad idea.

Anyone have a way for me to do this without smashing the guitar in frustration? I don’t like playing electrics with whammy bars on them cause I never use them, but I still want this thing to be usable again!!

HELP! DIE FLOYD ROSE!! (I think you may already be dead, but you get the point)

2

Can’t really help here except to bump it and to say I’ve had the same problem. Took me three days of tuning, tightening springs, retuning, tightening springs, wanting to do a Pete Townsend, retuning, ad infinitum.

3

Don’t have a FR myself, but maybe this will help:

http://www.jacksonguitars.com/techtips/floyd_setup.htm

(they appear to have taken all the strings off)

4

Here is a tip Stinkpalm:

Unscrew the backplate on that Ibanez, take a piece of two-by-two and block that fucker off. Besides being the tuning nightmare that you describe, they suck tone like a cone of silence. BTW, before I blocked mine off, I think I tuned the the d then the b then the the a then high e then low e.